Did you run a red light? This city has pictures of hundreds who did and is sending tickets

Hundreds of drivers decided last month that it’s better to run a red light than wait for a green at a couple of busy Pasco intersections.

Now they’ll be paying some green to the city in the form of a fine after getting caught breaking the law by Pasco’s new red light cameras.

The city recently wrapped up its inaugural month of using cameras to catch people at two of the city’s busiest intersections — Road 68 at Burden Boulevard as well as Court Street and 20th Avenue.

They mailed 857 citations to the registered owners of those vehicles.

The Redflex Automated Traffic Systems cameras are set up to cover four approaches to those intersections: north and south on Road 68, south on 20th Avenue and west on Court Street.

When someone runs a red light, a camera snaps a picture of the rear part of the vehicles entering the intersection. Pasco police officers review the picture to determine if the law was broken.

Once police whittled it down to people who actually ran the lights, they mailed tickets. Each of them comes with a $125 fine.

While more than half were heading south on Road 68, Capt. Jeff Harpster said it is unlikely that people are running the red lights to make it to the interstate. He pointed out the second-highest rate of red light runners came as people headed away from the interstate on 20th Avenue.

Still in its infancy

The cameras were installed with the goal of cutting down on the number of right-angle or “T-bone” collisions that are caused by people racing the light. The tight and busy intersections don’t offer a good vantage point for officers to watch for people running the red lights.

With the program just wrapping up its first month, it’s hard to tell how much of an impact the cameras are having on crashes at the intersection.

There are several factors that can affect how many cars are going through any of the intersections, including the time of year, what type of businesses might be nearby and whether school is in session.

It’s likely going to take at least six months to a year before the city knows how well the lights are working, City Manager Dave Zabell said.

He has seen them work, though. When he managed the city of Fife, a Tacoma suburb, that city saw a 38 percent drop in T-bone collisions.

This isn’t just limited to Fife. A 2017 paper in the Journal of Safety Research looked at 117 U.S. cities with more than 200,000 people where some used traffic-control cameras and some didn’t.

They found there were 21 percent fewer fatal red-light crashes in cities with working cameras compared with cities without them.

It is possible to redesign the intersections to decrease chance of crashes, such as putting in a roundabout, but it would take a multimillion-dollar investment, Zabell said.

“One of the huge impediments are how well developed those intersections are,” he said. “The buildings and utilities are already there. ... You can do anything if you want to spend the money on it.”

The problem with the Road 68 and Burden Boulevard intersection isn’t design, Zabell said. It’s the volume of cars moving through that location.

“Folks are frustrated because of the backup, and when they get their shot, they’re taking it,” he said.

The city is trying to give people more ways to avoid the intersection. It recently extended Burns Road so it connects to Road 100. Pasco is also working on filling in a section of Wrigley Drive. The new roadway connection would let drivers get into the residential area next to Road 68 without driving on Burden Boulevard.

How much is coming in

One of the concerns Zabell hears from people is the red light cameras are simply a cash grab by the city.

The cameras can result in a healthy stream of money, even in rural areas. In the Seattle area, one red light camera in Des Moines generated 24,443 tickets in the space of a year. While that location was on the high end, others saw between 3,070 and 10,326 tickets, according to a Seattle Times article.

In Moses Lake, a trio of red light cameras and two speeding cameras were estimated to make the city about $500,000 a year in 2018, according to the Columbia Basin Herald. They paid Redflex $300,000 for the cameras.

It’s still too early to tell how much money the city will see from the cameras, Zabell said. People still have a chance to challenge the tickets in Pasco Municipal Court, lowering the amount of the fine, and in some cases eliminating it all together.

“We don’t know the impact of it yet,” he said. “My sense is that a bunch of people got surprised. I would be shocked if that number was going to hold.”

As awareness sets in, he expects the number of people getting tickets will drop. Zabell pointed out the reason for putting the cameras in is to change people’s behavior, not to make money.

What money the city has left after paying for the court and the officers to review the tickets is being put toward traffic safety projects, he said.

“Nobody appreciates getting a citation, but knowing it’s going to traffic safety programs does make it a little easier to pay your ticket,” he said.

This story was originally published September 28, 2019 at 5:16 PM.