This Executive Summary Report presents the primary procedures and key findings of a red light running (RLR) investigation. 47,501 such crashes occurred in Alabama over a nine-year period, producing 16,306 injuries and fatalities. A RLR camera system installed in Tuscaloosa during this project confirmed the extent of the problem. It detected 13,647 violations out of 2,726,061 vehicles observed (about one out of every 200 vehicles). The RLR camera system stored the data on a Web site, where it was available to the research team and City of Tuscaloosa officials. The researchers investigated how the camera system operated, verified its accuracy, evaluated data taken at three intersections, and established the system’s cost effectiveness in reducing both RLR and RLR-related crashes. The system was found to be highly effective, and the researchers made the following recommendations: • An Alabama oversight committee should be formed to encourage adoption of RLR camera programs. • Legislation should be pursued in Alabama to enable automated enforcement of RLR. • In selecting sites for RLR cameras, the primary criteria should be crash history, violation history, opinions of local traffic engineers and law enforcement officials, and similar factors. • Revenues collected from RLR camera citations should be distributed according to the provisions proposed in Alabama House Bill 683, introduced in the 2001 Legislature. • If excess revenues (beyond the cost of the RLR camera program) are generated, they should be dedicated to safety and road projects in the host city. The research staff strongly encourages the adoption of automated enforcement of RLR in Alabama, as a safety countermeasure to mitigate the approximately 5,278 RLR collisions that occur each year, and to reduce the approximately 1,812 Alabama citizens injured and killed each year in these collisions. More-detailed descriptions of this subject and this project have been published in University Transportation Center for Alabama (UTCA) reports 00470, 00470-1, and 00470-2, all available on the UTCA web site. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting