Running a red light is potentially lethal

My house is at the top of a hill. At the bottom is an intersection with Whalley Avenue. That intersection is a few feet away from another at Whalley and Blake Street. Both intersections have traffic lights.

Thing about these intersections is they trick drivers into running a red light. Cars heading downtown stop at the first red light but can only see the second light. The second light turns green before the first light does. People often run the red not knowing what happened or why.

I don’t blame these drivers. Westvillians are used to it by now. It’s just one of those things that happens in a densely packed city like New Haven whose streets were laid out haphazardly over centuries.

But I don’t like New Haven’s other red-light habit.

While drivers run the red in Westville by accident, drivers blaze right through every other red wholly on purpose. One, two, three, maybe four cars will go through a red before cross traffic moves. This isn’t just civilians. The habit of running reds is so peculiar to living in New Haven that police officers do it, too. The honor of wearing a badge is mistaken for permission to dishonor the city’s public-safety laws.

I never saw anything like it before moving here in 2009. I have lived in Buffalo, Cincinnati, Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Each city has its traffic quirks. In Savannah, for instance, drivers habitually came to a full stop before making a right turn. But that was merely annoying. Running a red light is potentially lethal. Last year saw more than 50 pedestrians killed by motorists. I don’t know how many were from running red lights, but one is too many.

This isn’t rocket science, folks.

When you come to a red light, stop.

Because simple things are hard for some people (even cops), municipalities have installed red-light cameras. Mounted on or near traffic lights, these motion-triggered cameras photograph license plates when you run a red. The Department of Motor Vehicles then sends a copy of the photo with a ticket to the address listed on your file.

These are not perfect tools. The technology needs improving. And they are not without political controversy. The American Civil Liberties Union has long stood against the use of red-light cameras, claiming they threaten the rights of due process and privacy. According to the ACLU of Connecticut, they punish car owners, not car drivers. There may be months between the infraction and the citation, making defense impractical. And the government may be using them for surveillance.

These are reasonable objections usually magnified by antigovernment paranoia. I grew up with men, only men, who’d swear on a stack of Bibles that state cops had only one goal: to take your money. If constitutional issues do not stop potential legislation to authorize redlight cameras in Connecticut, anti-government paranoia will.

Indeed, these together have proven a formidable bloc. Every other year or so, state lawmakers in Hartford take another look at letting cities install red-light cameras. Just as frequently, they fail, because civil libertarians have made common cause with anti-government conservatives. But it’s not the state’s rural and suburban areas that are going to suffer. It’s the residents of the densely packed cities like New Haven.

Thing is, public safety has a role in the civil rights debate. Your right to run a red light must be weighed against my right not to be killed as I’m using the crosswalk. Given Connecticut saw more than 50 pedestrian deaths last year, it seems red-light proponents are on solid ground.

Still, we wouldn’t need redlight cameras if our police department made red lights a priority. I know there are competing priorities, but why do we have to turn to Hartford to solve a problem we can handle ourselves. At the very least, we can hold police to a higher standard. I’ve seen them. You’ve seen them. We’ve all seen cops run reds. The rest of us might obey traffic laws if the law enforcers did, too.

John Stoehr