New red-light cameras to start ticketing

FREMONT >> Automatic red-light enforcement cameras are going up at two crowded intersections near Fremont’s largest shopping center and will start capturing photos and videos of drivers Monday, the Fremont Police Department has announced.

The new cameras will be located at Auto Mall Parkway and Christy Street, and Auto Mall Parkway and Pacific Commons Boulevard, major intersections providing access to the many restaurants and stores of the Pacific Commons Shopping Center.

There will be a 30-day grace period during which anyone captured by the new cameras will be mailed a “warning letter” instead of a ticket, Fremont police said Thursday.

Beginning March 31, tickets

will be issued to people caught driving against red lights while headed westbound on Auto Mall Parkway as they cross Christy, and as they head northbound on Pacific Commons Boulevard, the city said.

At both intersections, the cameras will capture drivers running red lights while driving straight through the intersection and turning left through it, and they also will capture drivers rolling through right turns against red lights, according to Geneva Bosques, a city spokeswoman.

Previous city reports projected the vast majority of tickets issued at both intersections will be for rolling right turns.

Fremont already has 10 intersections around the city with such cameras, generating thousands of tickets annually, but with the addition of cameras at these two heavily trafficked intersections, the city estimates it will roughly double the number of tickets it issues each year.

Each ticket currently costs the driver $490 — a rate set by the State Judicial Council — and Fremont collects about $147 of that, according to a previous city staff report.

From the two Auto Mall intersections, the city expects to collect about $1.1

million in fines in the first year of operation, a little more than $1 million in the second year, and about $960,000 in the third year.

While all 10 of Fremont’s other intersections combined generated a total of 7,094 citations in 2019, prior city staff reports estimate the new Auto Mall Parkway cameras could generate an additional 7,581 citations each year.

Adding the new cameras on Auto Mall was approved by a 5-2 vote of the Fremont City Council at its June 16, 2020, meeting. Mayor Lily Mei and Councilman Yang Shao voted against authorizing the cameras, citing concerns about fairness of the fine rates.

They suggested that rolling right-turn violations, which are considered less dangerous, should draw lower fines, but said the courts do not currently differentiate between those violations.

“It’s almost like we are an accomplice to this scheme to charge people higher fines and get money,” Shao said during the June 2020 meeting.

Mei said she is worried there may not be enough court interpreters to help immigrants who are ticketed navigate the legal system.

She also acknowledged there are some lingering reputation concerns about the city’s longtime redlight camera contractor, Redflex Traffic Systems, whose former CEO was

one of three people sentenced to federal prison a few years ago for a bribery scheme that netted the company lucrative contracts in Chicago.

The city currently pays Redflex $479,400 a year for the cameras at the other 10 intersections and will pay an additional $120,000 annually for renting the newest cameras at the two Auto Mall intersections, city staff reports said.

Fremont police say the purpose of the cameras is to reduce collisions at intersections where they are mounted and said Thursday the city has been “very successful in reducing the number of red-light-related accidents and associated injuries due to redlight violations.”

Leaders of several other Bay Area cities have scrapped their red-light camera programs in recent years after questioning whether they really increase safety.

But Fremont police said in their previous report to the City Council that collisions at the 10 current intersections with cameras decreased by 62% in 2019 from the year before the cameras were installed.

Fremont police Lt. Ariel Quimson, when asked in multiple emails in June 2020 if the city has proof the reduction in collisions are caused by red-light cameras, did not cite any actual data.

Quimson said the reduction

in collisions is attributable to “education, engineering and enforcement.”

Quimson cited anecdotes shared by some council members at the June meeting about how their behavior changed after being caught by a red-light camera, as well as a series of other city efforts including “education through social media and sometimes through community presentations, and city-engineered roadway safety improvements.

Quimson also said the city in recent years has put in place a system where some drivers pulled over by officers are given warning citations with no fines as a way to “educate the community regarding safe driving habits.”