Safety first
Our view: While Baltimore’s mistake-prone speed cameras produced horrifying results, permanently abandoning such enforcement would be even worse
Baltimore residents have a choice in summer horror reading. They can pick up the latest by Stephen King, “Finders Keepers,” a detective story involving pages of unpublished material — and murder. Or they can peruse “Baltimore City Council Automated Traffic Violation Enforcement System (ATVES) Report,” a detective story involving pages of unpublished material — and wrongly-issued traffic citations.
Mr. King’s work may prove the bigger seller, but it’s hard to beat Baltimore’s speed camera foray for sheer folly and disgust. What the council’s year-long investigation found is pretty much what even the most casual readers of this newspaper had long suspected — the city really and truly mismanaged this debacle from start to finish.
Too large, too poorly supervised, too focused on producing revenue, both the speed and red-light cameras have essentially been mothballed for two years because city officials simply couldn’t be confident they produced accurate results. The villain was lack of care and competence, not corruption, but oh, what awful results mere sloppiness can produce.
Any system where cars can be ticketed for speeding when they were, in fact, parked on the street is clearly one for the record books. Such mistakes might have been caught — but the police review of these machine-generated citations was so rushed that the possibility of spotting errors was somewhere between slim and none. Why the vendors involved (particularly Xerox State & Local Solutions) received financial settlements from the city rather than prosecution is not entirely clear — aside from the obvious cost and inconvenience.
But that’s old news. What the council’s investigation actually produced is not so much a smoking gun as a confirmation that fundamental mistakes were made. Tellingly, the authors are quick to complain about a lack of cooperation from the mayor’s office in acquiring documents to make their case but devote not one paragraph to lambasting the council’s own supervisory failure. As flattering as it might be that it took an investigative series in The Sun to pique their interest, the Baltimore City Council could have asked these questions years earlier.
Sadly, all this chronicling of incompetence in City Hall shortchanges what might be the report’s most important conclusion — that Baltimore needs to get its cameras back on line. Not on the scale of the past, of course, but in a better supervised program with vendor performance metrics, with no more “bounty” payments per citation, with penalties for poor performance and with a website where people can get more information about the cameras.
Why reactivate? Simply because the cameras are a powerful tool for saving lives. The data demonstrate that conclusively. The introduction of speed cameras coincides with a reduction in speed-related crashes — 29 percent from 2009 to 2012 — while red-light safety cameras lowered red-light running fatalities by 17 percent.
That really should come as no surprise. Other jurisdictions have produced similar results. And it just makes sense: Once people become aware of a potential enforcement camera at an intersection or along a stretch of road, they are more prone to respect traffic signals or slow down. And the cameras are much cheaper than assigning the task to police officers who have more pressing responsibilities, like dealing with the city’s soaring homicide rate.
Just as important to their success is where one positions the cameras. They shouldn’t be located on stretches of lonely roads where motorists are prone to speed (and thus allow the city to issue more $40 tickets) but near schools where young pedestrians are most at risk (and thus save lives and prevent serious injury). That was, after all, the express intent of the General Assembly in authorizing speed cameras in the first place. That the administration expects to earn $2.5 million in camera-related revenue in the next fiscal year (assuming the devices are reactivated on Jan. 1) instead of the $7.5 million of the past, with none of it necessarily going to the city’s general fund, is a good sign that the true purpose of the cameras is better understood.
Still, it’s far from certain that Baltimore can properly manage this type of enforcement. The language of the contracts, the abilities of whomever is assigned to manage the program, the quality of whatever company wins the contract, all could shape the outcome. And while there’s no guarantee the mistakes of the past won’t be made again, shutting down the program permanently still looks like a worse option. We shouldn’t concede that an increase in the number of fatal crashes and pedestrian deaths due to speeding and red-light running is unavoidable when that’s simply not the case.