Red Light, Green Light, 1-2-3

Let’s say you’re a municipal politician, and your town has a traffic problem: there’s a major intersection with a troubling number of accidents. You and the rest of the city council reach a consensus to mount red light cameras at that intersection in an attempt to catch and cite the poor drivers causing these accidents, thereby fulfilling your political obligation to bring safety to your streets.

So your city buys the cameras and puts them up. One month later, you check the police record of accidents at that intersection to see how well the cameras are working, and you discover accidents there have gone up by 50%.

What do you do?

Well, the first question is, what were you trying to do?

Were you trying to appear tough on crime (perhaps to heighten your reelection chances, make the population feel safer, improve your self-image, or some combination of these)? If so, your next course of action depends on the general public view of traffic cameras in your city. Do what your constituents tell you to do.

Were you trying to make the intersection be safer in actuality? Then you should studiously investigate why the accident rate rose, and if you discover that the cameras are the cause, you should remove them.

That’s when politics gets difficult.

Some people will say you’re a waffler. They will say you are incompetent — that if you were good at your job, you would do things right the first time.

Some people will say that you favor removing the cameras only because your political rivals favor keeping them.

Some will say you’ve drunk the Libertarian Kool-Aid. Next thing you know, you’ll be endorsing a return to the gold standard and the abolishment of the EPA, the DOE, the TSA, the DEA, and the Federal Reserve.

Some people will think you are insane and stupid to take the cameras down because they couldn’t possibly be the reason for the increase. Basic common sense says that monitoring people makes them behave better, not worse. Do highway drivers speed up when they see a cop with a radar gun? Do shoppers stuff more groceries into their pockets when they notice a security guard? No. Something else must be at work here. Maybe the department that counts accidents counted them wrong, or counted right but lied, or maybe they counted correctly and told you the truth but now you’re lying. That’s far more likely. You’re a politician. Of course you’re lying!

Some people will concede that it’s entirely plausible for the increase to be real and for the cameras to be the cause. They’ll speculate that the subset of drivers accustomed to zipping through late yellows are still in the habit of accelerating to squeak through before the red, except now they get a last-moment realization that they’re almost certain to be ticketed if they are so much as half a second late, so they stop abruptly…and get rear-ended. However, the only citizens suffering these increased accidents are the ones who were trying to skirt the law and the inattentive drivers behind them, both of whom deserve misfortune as punishment for their unconscionable driving habits. Removing the cameras would give a break only to the people who least deserve one. On top of that, it would be tantamount to admitting we can’t make people obey the law, and so we’re better off appeasing those we cannot govern. That’s a horrible thought to people who prefer civilization to anarchy!

Some people will say that of course there are more accidents this month. It’s summer and more people drive in summer. Only an idiot doesn’t know that. (They will then ignore you when you mention that your study accounted for seasonal and other periodic variations.)

Some people will ask how accident rates could rise so sharply in this town from this one single factor when so few other towns experienced that after installing their cameras. This is an excellent question that bears deep investigation.