Cops aim to stop those who won't

by Laura Norris, news editor   

Recently, there has been talk of installing traffic cameras at certain Lubbock intersections.

But is that all it’s going to amount to, talk?

The city introduced this idea back in August and has yet to make a move. They planned to make a little more than 2 million the first year off of red-light tickets. After that, revenue would decrease as the years pass.

 This process was already painstakingly long, but now it is expected to be delayed even longer because the Lubbock City Council has to review the existing traffic system, including the timing of the yellow lights. By making the yellow lights longer, it will allow for more time to proceed through the intersection or safely stop without getting rear-ended. According to a Lubbock traffic engineer, there should be one second of yellow light for every 10 miles an hour of the posted speed limit.

The Texas Transportation Institute did a study and found that just one extra second on the yellow light would reduce the number of collisions by 40 percent. When you look at the big picture, that is a lot of car accidents. But Lubbock officials have already rejected this thought.

Lubbock City Councilman John Leonard, who is very dissatisfied with the new cameras, calls them “a revenue-generating invasion of privacy.”

Yes, they are there only to make the city money, but is it an invasion of privacy? I really don’t see how he came up with that. You have privacy in your home, but in your car, when you’re in public, is not an invasion of privacy, especially when it comes to following the traffic rules.

I am against the cameras, not because it’s just another money-making law, but because studies have shown that when red-light cameras are used, there is not much of a difference between the intersections that have them and those that don’t. One thing that did increase (even doubled in one study in Maryland) were the amount of rear-end crashes. However, there are indications that the rate of serious accidents is decreasing.

It is inevitable that these cameras are going to be up in a matter of time, and the citizens of Lubbock are just going to have to deal with it. But I think that if we have to have them, there should at least be signs and warnings that traffic cameras are in use at those particular intersections.