Category: traffic violence

Automated Red Light Cameras are NOT Automated License Plate Readers

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Automated Red Light Cameras are NOT Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR).

Recently Flock Safety cameras, and similar cameras by other vendors, including the Motorola cameras used in the City of Sacramento, have been much in the news, and there growing public concern and desire to ban or tightly control their use. You can read up on how they have been mis-used by law enforcement agencies. They are a step toward a univeral surveillance state. ALPRs continuously record license plate numbers, and depending on the setup, also other information including vehicle identification and even facial recognition of the driver. Though law enforcement claims that license plates are correctly identified, and that data is shared only with those who need to know, it has been demonstrated that they are very inaccurate, and that the data is being accessed by almost anyone associated with law enforcement or government agencies. Including stalking by law enforcement officers.

Automated Red Light Cameras (and similar Automated Speed Enforcement Cameras) are completely different. They record only incidents of violation, such as running red lights, and capture only license plate numbers. They are not continuous, do not record any other information, and have retention periods only long enough to resolve the civil citations. You can read a good summary of the privacy safeguards on City of Sacramento’s Automated Red Light Camera Enforcement Program page, or more detail on the SB 770 legislation page.

If you get into or overhear a discussion that confuses ALPRs with red light cameras, I hope that you will jump in with the correct information. Being anti-Flock should not means being anti-red light cameras.

Some of this confusion is understandable. To the public, any camera may seem like the camera of concern. At a typical intersection, there may be upwards of ten cameras, all for different purposes, or overlapping purposes. Probably some are ALPRs. Some are for detection, that allow the signal to detect motor vehicles and bicyclists, some are for traffic detection, allowing an agency to adjust for traffic flows. Sadly, most agencies do not actively manage traffic, even though they have spent huge sums on the signals, controller boxes, and central traffic centers that would allow them to do so.

I know that much of the ‘confusion’ is intentional. There is a large subset of motor vehicle drivers who do not want to be held responsible for their driving behavior and the traffic violence they create. Lumping red light cameras (and speed cameras) in with surveillance cameras furthers their attempt to ban all cameras. Don’t fall for it! Help educate your friends, co-workers, agencies, elected officials, and organizations.

See my previous posts: SacATC 2026-08-20: red light camera program and are there Flock cameras in the City of Sacramento?, and many others.

SacBee’s Ariane Lange keeps focus on victims of traffic violence

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In today’s SacBee, two articles by Ariane Lange keep the focus on victims of traffic violence.

Before Ariane Lange, now joined by Madison Smalstig, the SacBee had always parroted law enforcement assessments of traffic violence crashes, which almost always blamed the victim, and rarely the driver, except in cases of egregious DUI. Law enforcement has a well-known windshield bias, in which motor vehicle drivers like themselves are blameless, whereas walkers and bicyclists, unlike themselves, are assumed to be at fault. Later investigations often reveal that law enforcement had either fabricated information or neglected to report key information, but that was never covered in follow-up articles. The SacBee went along with this bias. As result, readers assumed just what defenders of our car-centric transportation system wanted them to assume, that crashes are just accidents, that are not avoidable. We know better. Since Ariane Lange, readers know better.

The one thing I will comment on is that Ariane let Elk Grove off the hook too easily. “The speed limit on that part of the road is 45 mph. In the immediate area of the crash, Sheldon Road has six general-purpose lanes plus the center turn lanes. It’s wide and fairly straight, with clear sightlines and few reasons to slow down.” “A spokesperson for the city of Elk Grove, Sydney Robertson, said that after Lopez was killed, the Public Works Department reviewed the site and “concluded that the intersection was properly constructed to applicable standards. Although not required, a yield sign was installed.” “The roadway, the city determined, had nothing to do with his death.”

In fact, the roadway had everything to do with the death. Six general purpose lanes means that the road is an arterial, designed to carry high speed traffic. An unprotected left turn lane into a commercial area means that the road is a street. This road/street hybrid is called a ‘stroad‘ (Strong Towns), and it is well known by all that stroads kill people, and also kill communities and livability. At 45 mph, as though most drivers are not driving way faster, crashes with walkers and bicyclists and motorcyclists, are almost guaranteed to result in death. Elk Grove designed and built that road. Just because the road meets ‘standards’ (which were written by people who believe the purpose of roads is to carry the maximum number of motor vehicles at the maximum possible speed) doesn’t mean that it is safe, and doesn’t mean that such designs are not malfeasance on the part of the city.

If a roadway is designed for high volume and high speed, it should have no commercial access. If the city wants commercial access, the roadway should be designed for lower volume and lower speed. Yet the shopping center that contains WinCo was permitted with two driveways, and the driveway that the driver was aiming for has two entry lanes, further encouraging drivers to cross the opposing lanes of traffic at a high speed. Just to make the message clear that this is a place for motor vehicles and nothing else, there are three drive-through fast food chains, and a huge parking lot for the shopping center. As a sop to people walking from their cars, there are two walkways in the parking lot. For the west one, at the north side, there is no marked crosswalk. On the south side, there is no safe crossing at all. For the east one, that leads towards WinCo, there is a marked crosswalk on the north side, but on the south side, the walkway does not align with the cross-hatched pedestrian areas, nor is it protected by the stop signs. The shopping center designers clearly do not walk, but more importantly, the city did not question the unsafe design, and permitted it.

It is bad enough that our car-centric culture and legal system largely excuse drivers of traffic violence, but it is even worse, in my opinion, that we give planners and traffic engineers a pass on the roadways they design in a way that they know will result in fatal crashes. This is no way excuses the driver at fault here of both legal and moral responsibility, but if we keep blaming crashes only on drivers, or blaming no one at all, we will never solve the problem.

overview of Sheldon Rd in Elk Grove, with site of fatal crash
Sheldon Rd in Elk Grove, with site of fatal crash

crime and motor vehicles in Old Sac

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Police shutting down Old Sacramento streets to cars in response to weekend violence, SacBee, 2026-07-31, https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article316718152.html

It is interesting to see SacPD and Downtown Sacramento Partnership acknowledging the correlation between crime and private motor vehicles. Causation? I’ll speculate yes.

Why is there motor vehicle access to Old Sacramento, at any time? I’d suggest no motor vehicles at any time, except access for handicap placards, and delivery, off hours.

Drive-by shootings, sideshows, crashes killing bicyclists and walkers, red light running. All of these require private motor vehicles and their drivers. Crimes, all.

Emergency Streets

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Listening to the Talking Headways podcast this morning, there was a brief reference to Emergency Streets and Kevin Krizek. I immediately went to the Emergency Streets website. I have to admit that it is immensely satisfying to me when I find a formal program similar to what I have posted about before: someone died here, close the intersection (2026-02).

“Emergency Streets inculcates a sense of urgency requiring a response by every driver on the road. Reframing the problem as a public health matter has potential to shock the system and foment change. Emergency Streets can help sidestep some of the existing bureaucratic and cultural barriers to slower, safer driving, without compromising other public priorities.”

Emergency Streets – Why

Emergency Streets is a developed program that consulted with academics and street safety staff and advocates. It is robust and innovative. I encourage you to look at the website, and I’ve linked two of the relevant documents: Emergency Streets Protocol and Emergency Streets White Paper.

The program is not dissimilar to the Strong Towns Crash Analysis Studio, but is a much quicker response. See Strong Towns: Safe & Productive Streets.

In most cases, Emergency Streets does not propose to close the intersection, except as briefly necessary to set up controls and communication, but it focuses on immediately slowing traffic, within 36 hours, and notifying the public of the fatality, on the ground and through media. Signage should be in place within five days. Changes of up to a half mile before the location are recommended, though I think that depends on the context. Arterial streets with few cross-streets and fewer safe crossings? Yes, a half mile. A street with many cross-streets and possibly safe crossings at other intersections, a shorter distance would work.

The table below provides an example of treatments, but please look at the entire Protocol document for more details.

The City of Sacramento Tactical Action Group (quick build program) has not been fully defined yet, but I recommend the city consider the Emergency Streets program for adoption. At this time, the best information is a TAG presentation given to Strong SacTown. (Note that I have not posted on the TAG/quick build since it was on city council agenda in March 2025. I will correct that.)

graphic of Emergency Streets logo
Emergency Streets logo

leading causes of death

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The chart below shows the leading causes of ‘unintentional’ death in the US, 2019 to 2023. The chart is from Centers for Disease Control (CDC) WISQARS Leading Causes of Death page. Change filters to see the ‘unintentional’ data. Ironically, one of the available filters is ‘Violence-Related Injuries’, but these ‘Unintentional MV (motor vehicle) Traffic’ datum are not in that category, though they are clearly violence. Traffic violence. And of course not all is ‘unintentional’. And as with all traffic violence data, it does not include crashes that occur on private property, people run over in parking lots and children killed in their own driveway.

I often see it stated that traffic violence is the leading or second leading category of preventable death, but I find this more detailed view worthwhile.

Credit to Emergency Streets for the idea, and the link to CDC WISQARS. My selection criteria is slightly different than theirs. I’ll write soon about Emergency Streets.

someone died here, close the intersection

Dan Allison1 Comment

When a traffic crash results in a fatality, society mostly shrugs and moves on. Until Ariane Lange started writing in the SacBee about the victims of traffic, there wasn’t even a shrug. Sometimes all the evidence of someone dying is some small car parts pushed to the side, and maybe a small oil slick, easily ignored. There is nothing to say someone died here. The people who died might be drivers, passengers, walkers, bicyclists. Real people whose lives were cut short. It is likely for two reasons: roadway design that encourages speeding and reckless driver behavior, and human mistakes.

Rather than shrugging and moving on, we need to take notice. I think the best way is to close the intersection where the fatality occurred, and yes, it is quite often though not always, intersections. They are the locations with the most complex movement of motor vehicles, particularly turning movements, and walkers and bicyclists. The intersection should be closed until some action is taken to make the intersection safer.

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it’s not just transportation infrastructure

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It has been increasingly common to refrain from blaming traffic violence on drivers, and instead to point to transportation infrastructure which encourages drivers to speed and to act in such a way as to create crashes. There is truth in this, and equity to some degree. But I think the pendulum has swung too far in that direction, and it is time to bring back driver responsibility.

We have invested trillions of dollars to create a transportation system that kills and mains countless people, with an emphasis on harming people who walk and bicycle. This was not an ‘accident’. Traffic engineers knew that their roadway designs would kill people, but absolved themselves of responsibility by pointing to the ‘standards’, which promote these designs, but are based on nothing but speculation and bias. It is always easier to blame crashes on driver behavior than to design safe roadways. Well, here we are. It will cost trillions to fix. We don’t have that money. That is not to say we should not be fixing what we can, with a priority on those designs and locations that have killed the most people, or seem most likely to.

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the worst drivers

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I frequently travel to cities on the west coast and the intermountain west, and just recently traveled to several cities in the southern and eastern states. When I travel, I am always paying attention to transportation systems and driver behavior, in no small part because I get around by walking, bicycling and transit. From these experiences, I can state clearly that Sacramento has the worst drivers of any city I’ve visited. The incidence of aggressive and belligerent drivers is probably about average. What is so different, though, is the low skill level of drivers here. A brief list:

  • unawareness of traffic law (California Vehicle Code), both old and new
  • oblivious to what is going on around them, focused on their phone or car or daydreaming, not paying attention to others on and off the roadway
  • no understanding of taking turns at intersections with four-way stop signs; the most basic rule of intersections, first come – first served, is apparently not known by most drivers
  • uncertainty about where their vehicle is on the road; drifting into adjacent traffic lanes and bike lanes, stopping where they probably did not intend to stop; this is not just a problem of oversized trucks and SUVs where the driver cannot actually see the roadway, but for most drivers of most vehicles; the damage to vertical delineators, medians, traffic circles and roundabout, and curbs, attests that they don’t know where their vehicle is, or don’t care
  • unwillingness to stop (or yield, as the law states) for people walking across the street at intersections
  • failing to look when entering or exiting driveways for people on the sidewalk
  • running stop signs
  • running red lights

And most irritating to me, stopping for bicyclists when the driver has the right of way and the bicyclist does not. This teaches bicyclists to go when it is not legal for them to do so, and not safe. It also delays bicyclists. I once totaled up the amount of time I wasted waiting for drivers to take their legal right of way, and it was about 20 hours per year. Time that I will never get back.

I agree that really solving bad driver behavior requires correcting the roadways. But we have spent billions building unsafe roadways, and will have to spend billions making roadways safe again. When will we have that kind of money?

Again, Sacramento is sort of in the middle of cities making changes to their roadways. Much less than many cities (most notably the bay area), but significantly more than many cities. So the lack of safe roadways does not explain all of the bad driver behavior. Drivers here really are less skilled.

Why? I don’t know. But I’m certainly getting tired of it. Nearly every trip I take walking and bicycling, I am threatened by unskilled drivers, yes, and sometimes belligerent drivers. Sometimes many times on a single trip. I have a high level of skill in both walking and bicycling, watching out for and responding to unskilled driving. But what of everyone else who does not have that skill level? It is ironic that I, as a walker and bicyclist, need a high level of skill to navigate our transportation system, but the same expectation of drivers does not exist.

how to stop red light running

Dan Allison3 Comments

I’ve posted about the red light running epidemic: red light cameras and law enforcement; the end of red light enforcement; how do we get more red light cameras?; red light running consequences; SacCity red light cameras and crashes; Sac Vision Zero intersections & red light cameras; red light cameras; pandemic of red light running; and red-light-running bullies.

Of all the traffic violence occurring on our roadways, this is the one that concerns me the most. When one driver runs a red light and hits another driver going on the green light, the result is almost always serious injury and sometimes fatality. It is a particularly high impact crash because the driver running the red light is often accelerating into the intersection, because they have decided (consciously or not) that they are going to run the light, and want to get through as quickly as they can. T-bone crashes, which red light running crashes almost always are, are especially damaging.

The red light running epidemic started with the pandemic, in my observation, though it has always been present. I’ve seen multiple explantations of why this is, but the relative lack of cars on the road, and the resulting perception that the road belongs to the driver alone, is one common explanation. But as the pandemic has faded, red light running has not faded, it has increased month over month. If you observe any moderately busy intersection, you will see drivers run red lights on nearly every signal cycle. Other drivers, and people walking and bicycling, have responded to this lawlessness by not going on the green. People now expect someone to be running the red light, and pause until all the vehicles have stopped. Green lights and pedestrian signals were never a guarantee of safety, but now they are a guarantee of danger.

I have said before, and continue to strongly believe, that automated red light enforcement is the top solution to this behavior. I believe that most drivers would stop doing it if they were ticketed a few times. Some would not, or course, because there are drivers on the road for whom the cost of a ticket is meaningless, and their consideration of other people’s lives is nil. Such drivers will create a pattern of law breaking that can be identified and stopped by suspension of drivers license, and more importantly, confiscation of their vehicle. In my observation, most of the red light runners are driving high value cars. Tickets mean nothing, but loss of their expensive car will get their attention.

Red light running is the traffic violence issue probably least amendable to infrastructure solutions. It is a choice by drivers, and one not primarily induced by poorly designed roadways.

There are research papers from the 1990s through early 2010s that suggest changes to the signals to reduce red light running. Bigger and brighter signals. larger brighter reflective backplates around the signals (these have been common recently with the yellow reflective backplates). Changing the all-red interval to a longer period, or the yellow signal to a longer period, but drivers adjust to this and increase their risk behavior to compensate. Placing advance warning signing or flashing lights, more appropriate for rural situations than cities. I don’t believe that any of these have a significant impact. Horizontal rather than vertical placement of the signal heads may have some beneficial effect.

Moving signals to near-side locations of the intersection is the solution in many parts of the world. Near-side signal placing does reduce red light running because the driver is responding to the signal on the close side of the intersection, not the far side. Research supports this, but the US refuses to make this change.

And of course education, encouraging drivers to follow the law and to cease actions that endanger others. I’m pretty cynical about education. Education works when someone does not know the consequences of their behavior. But drivers do know the consequences of their red light running. They’ve gotten away with it so far, but I doubt that any of them think they will get away with it forever.

Redesigning roadways and intersections to create more friction, such as narrower lanes and curb extensions to slow drivers, reducing the energy of crashes, but neither prevent red light running. Protected intersections reduce the hazard for bicyclists and walkers, by better separating movements and shortening crossing distances, but they don’t prevent red light running.

Though research clearly supports daylighting for increasing visibility between drivers and walkers, it may also increase red light running because drivers do, or think they do, have a better view of the intersection and whether approaching vehicles are going to cause them problems. I’m all for daylighting, but this issue must be acknowledged.

I believe automated red light running enforcement is the most effective solution, but others should be considered in addition to, not in place of, automated enforcement.

I searched for but did not find any research or even preliminary information on red light running and solutions since the beginning of the pandemic. It is possible some is underway. It is not the sort of thing that would be funded in the current administration, but it might not be rescinded.

Howard Chan and traffic deaths emergency

Dan Allison1 Comment

Note: I have always thought it was part of my role to say the things that other people are afraid to say, for fear of rocking the boat or retribution. But this needs to be said.

On November 12, the city Law & Legislation Committee considered agenda item 6, Councilmember Proposal Request for Committee Consideration – Declaring a State of Emergency Regarding Traffic Deaths. This was introduced by Council Member/Vice Mayor Caity Maple and also sponsored by Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Mayor Pro-tem Karina Talamantes. The item was amended before the committee meeting to remove item 3, ‘Direct the City Manager to work with the Police Department to ramp up enforcement of traffic laws, especially around distracted driving, speed enforcement, and crosswalk violations’ which was opposed by most of the transportation advocacy community including Civic Thread and SABA, which led community discussion of the proposal and made recommendations for improvements. This is a sign of progress, though many have questioned whether it will make a difference, given that there is only support for and not specific funding tied to quick-build projects to make our streets safer, now.

How did we get to the point of emergency?

I believe City of Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan is the person most responsible for creating this emergency. Chan has opposed including any funds in the city budget for addressing the crisis. When the proposal from Sacramento Active Transportation Commission for $10M in funding to address the problem came before the council, he nixed it. Chan has a regressive understanding of public safety, which counts the number police officers and ignores other threats to the safety and lives of citizens. Chan is uninterested in public health. Chan has supervised the Department of Public Works, accepting and promoting the idea that roadways are for moving cars, and not community resources for access and life. Chan has created a city staff culture that avoids innovation and accountability, live in fear of getting sued or getting fired. Chan carries out projects and programs that he is interested in, and ignores everything else.

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