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Kansas City may revive red light cameras to help stop traffic deaths. But there's a tradeoff

A driver crashed into another car after running this red light at 75th Street and Ward Parkway in June 2022. One driver was killed.
Chase Castor
/
The Beacon
A driver crashed into another car after running this red light at 75th Street and Ward Parkway in June 2022. One driver was killed.

Almost a decade after Kansas City stopped using red-light cameras, the city is considering bringing them back. The funding from fines could go towards driver's ed classes, speed bumps and crosswalks.

Ward Parkway, lined with lush trees and a string of fountains, is heaven on a breezy summer afternoon. It’s also a meat grinder.

Eight people have died in traffic crashes along Ward Parkway since 2022, and four of those crashes happened when cars cruised past a red light or stop sign.

People make mistakes. Even the most experienced drivers misjudge the timing on a yellow light or roll through a stop sign.

But on roads like Ward Parkway — where traffic regularly tops the 35 mph speed limit — such mistakes prove deadly.

That’s why the Kansas City Council is following St. Louis’ efforts to bring back the red-light cameras it shut off more than a decade ago over legal challenges. But now it’s got direction from the courts about what’s legal and what’s not.

Right-angle, or T-bone, crashes pose one of the most dangerous types of collisions. They caused a fifth of Kansas City’s traffic deaths in 2022 and 2023.

“That driver is probably going to hit the other person at (full) speed,” said Paul Atchley, a professor in traffic psychology at the University of South Florida. “When you hit someone at speed, particularly at a right angle, that’s going to lead to a fatality or a significant injury.”

But those red-light cameras come with their own set of concerns. For one, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that they’d been deployed illegally by equating license plates with vehicle owners.

Studies suggest mixed safety outcomes when the cameras spy on drivers. Traffic safety experts say they need to be used with other road engineering to boost safety — otherwise, they could simply be used to make money for City Hall.

How Missouri cities are trying to bring back red-light cameras

Red-light cameras first popped up in St. Louis in 2007 and paid salaries for new police officers. Kansas City followed in 2009, installing cameras that generated $2 million a year from some of its most dangerous intersections.

But a series of court challenges put those cameras out of commission in 2015 because they only photographed the license plate. The city could prove that a car ran a red light, but it couldn’t prove who was driving.

The court didn’t outright bar red-light cameras. It just said that the cameras had to capture drivers’ faces. The company operating the cameras was capable of doing that, but Kansas City and St. Louis still stopped citing drivers based on the cameras.

Many drivers viewed the cameras cynically.

“Regular folks were getting hit with these tickets to fill the coffers of these municipalities with money that they frankly don’t need,” attorney Bevis Schock told St. Louis Public Radio when the old camera use ran into legal challenges.

St. Louis is bringing the cameras back, and Alderman Shane Cohn hopes they’ll have a better reputation. The Board of Aldermen voted in April to revive red-light cameras with tweaks to comply with the 2015 court ruling. Instead of paying police salaries, fines generated by the cameras will go toward driver’s education classes and roadwork like mini roundabouts, flashing stop signs, speed bumps, crosswalks or speed limit signs.

“The last time the city went through this, the money went (to) general revenue,” Cohn said. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate way to enforce traffic.”

A proposed Kansas City ordinance mimics what St. Louis is doing. The City Council plans to take up a plan in mid-July.

Kansas City turned off its red-light cameras a decade ago. Now that the courts have clarified rules for using them, the city may turn them back on.
Photo illustration based on image by Josh Merchant
/
The Beacon
Kansas City turned off its red-light cameras a decade ago. Now that the courts have clarified rules for using them, the city may turn them back on.

What does the research say?

Achilleas Kourtellis, an assistant program director at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research, said that rear-end collisions usually increase when red-light cameras are first installed because drivers slam on their brakes to avoid a ticket.

But rear-end crashes tend to be less deadly than right-angle crashes.

“You’re exchanging one type for the other,” he said. “But you’re definitely reducing how many people die at the end of the day.”

That trade-off is deliberate. Safety experts increasingly recognize that crashes are, to some degree, inevitable. But redesigned roads might make them less deadly.

“We all have that moment of the sun in our eyes,” said Leah Shahum, the executive director of the Vision Zero Network. “In a world (without traffic deaths), will there still be crashes? Yeah, but these would probably be fender benders, a broken ankle or a broken arm. …They’re not fatal, and that’s a big difference.”

Dozens of cities across the U.S. have made a Vision Zero goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities. Kansas City passed its own plan in 2020 to wipe out fatal crashes by 2030.

The Vision Zero Network generally supports traffic cameras, Shahum said. It likes speed cameras more than red-light cameras.

The St. Louis and Kansas City legislation will allow for both.

For some people, a $150 fine means they cuss, complain and write a check. But for other drivers, it means a missed car payment, late rent or skipping meals. Shahum pointed to California’s new traffic camera law that gives alternatives to lower-income drivers.

That California law allows drivers receiving welfare benefits to pay a lower fine, enroll in a payment plan or perform community service instead.

Sweden has also experimented with making its traffic cameras less costly for drivers without giving up the benefits.

Julia Griswold, the director of the University of California-Berkeley’s traffic safety research center, said Sweden clearly marks every speed camera, but a control center randomly turns them on and off.

“People know when they’re passing a speed camera, they just don’t know whether it’s on,” she said. “So they’re not issuing a huge number of tickets … but (drivers) do change their behavior because of the risk.”

That approach, she said, has built trust with drivers that Sweden’s cameras aren’t just a cash grab.

More permanent changes

Four cars, three black and one red, head southbound on Southwest Trafficway. One black truck attempts to turn left. A city van turns right onto West 39th Street. Behind the cars is a building with a blue roof. Construction cones sit in a pile in the background.
Savannah Hawley
/
KCUR 89.3
Drivers attempt to turn left and right while others continue straight at the intersection of Southwest Trafficway and West 39th Street.

Some streets, like Ward Parkway or Southwest Trafficway, make it tempting to speed.

The expansive roadways allow you to comfortably drive 10 to 15 mph above the speed limit. In fact, stick to the 35 mph speed limit and you expect to tick off other drivers.

A speed camera might scare drivers into slowing down, but it won’t get rid of the temptation.

“Maybe the camera’s that quick and easy fix,” Shahum said. “But it probably means you need to redesign that street. It probably means there’s a bigger underlying problem.”

Those street redesigns could include removing lanes or planting trees to create the illusion of a narrower street.

Michael Kelley, the policy director at BikeWalkKC, is cautious about automatic traffic cameras.

“You can’t enforce your way out of speeding,” he said. “The enforcement piece should be the absolute last resort when you can’t do anything else.”

It’s a step in the right direction to spend the money from traffic tickets on road improvements related to Vision Zero, Kelley said, but he wants that money to go directly to the streets with the most tickets.

He doesn’t want speeding drivers on Prospect Avenue to end up subsidizing speed bumps in a neighborhood across town. In that kind of scenario, the speed cameras would effectively be a toll booth.

“We should be investing in funds to change the built environment,” he said, “so we don’t need the speed cameras anymore.”

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.

Josh Merchant is The Kansas City Beacon's local government reporter.
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