Santa Fe drivers need to do better

Santa Fe residents — rightly — are concerned about safe driving in general and drivers who run red lights specifically. It’s not just several recent fatal accidents, some apparently involving red-light runners. No, it’s the sightings nearly every day of the week of people not following the speed limits, passing dangerously and barreling through actual red lights or simply moving through yellow as if the cautionary signal means “speed up” rather than “slow down.”

One Facebook poster at the Santa Fe Bulletin Board chat group, asked this question: “Curious. How many red light runners have you seen today? I saw three on my way to the office (Sol y Lomas to downtown). Yesterday I saw six and one was a Santa Fe Trails bus.”

Other posters chimed in — three a day, six a day and so on.

Matt Fagan wrote to Mayor Alan Webber recently about traffic enforcement: “We need to have traffic enforcement in Santa Fe performed by the [police]. Parking a vacant patrol car in the median once in a while does not cut it. Seeing folks pulled over does. St. Francis is a bit of a free for all. Just read Facebook posts about red-light runners. Plenty of accidents. Light turns green and you wait for the intersection to clear out before you go in Santa Fe.”

Like many other residents, Fagan is asking for more traffic enforcement, tickets handed out and police presence to protect safe drivers from those who are not paying attention.

Webber, in response, wrote about recent traffic blitzes — more will be coming in early March — and his administration’s hiring of additional officers and paying more to attract and keep cops. But Webber also made a salient point, one that all the people complaining about bad driving should ponder. The problem of bad driving is nothing new.

“People think it’s funny when they tell me that, ‘In Santa Fe, a red light is just a suggestion.’ But when there’s a fatality — and we’ve had too many — it’s not funny at all,” Webber wrote. He thinks the town needs to discuss openly why people feel free to run red lights. In other words, why do so many of us drive carelessly in Santa Fe?

To change that dynamic, the mayor wrote, “we’ll explore enforcement, technology, and most important, a renewed awareness on the part of drivers that speeding and running red lights is dangerous — and too often lately — fatal.”

We believe the city should work with the state Department of Transportation — the department’s advertisements raising awareness of DWI and pedestrian safety have been compelling. Perhaps radio and print advertisements could focus on red-light safety and distracted driving. Cellphones also are a problem on city streets, and many red-light runners often are talking or texting instead of paying attention.

The city might want to review the timing of lights — are yellow lights held for too short a time or too long? Are lights synchronized? Do driver’s education classes emphasize traffic light safety enough? There might need to be remedial education, not just for drivers who receive traffic tickets, but for everyone with a driver’s license. Insurance discounts for safety courses could be an incentive. Use a carrot, as well as the stick of more traffic tickets and enforcement.

Nationally, some 989 people were killed in crashes involving red-light running in 2017 — the most recent year numbers are available, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. That’s a 10-year high and a 28 percent increase since 2012. Experts believe distractions — cellphones, especially — are behind the increase. That’s why we need police patrols to catch people using cellphones while driving.

It also might be time to consider whether red-light cameras will discourage dangerous driving. We have been unconvinced that using cameras to stop speeders without better due process is the best approach; but there is evidence that red-light cameras can reduce incidents of running lights, cutting down on crashes and fatalities.

But cameras — whether to reduce speeding or drivers who run red lights — work best as part of a comprehensive traffic safety strategy. That includes both engineering and education, according to the AAA Traffic Foundation. For the cameras to work, they must be placed at intersections with a pattern of violations or crashes and drivers must be told that cameras are in use.

With better traffic patrols, attention to the timing of lights, smart use of cameras at dangerous intersections and most of all, better individual behavior from drivers, Santa Fe must turn dangerous driving around. The lives we save could be our own.