Commuters passing through Falls Church be warned: Tuesday marks the first day that cameras along Route 7 (Broad Street) will stick red-light runners with a $50 ticket, delivered to mailboxes. While the effectiveness of red-light cameras in deterring accidents remains up for debate, Robin Gardner, a Falls Church city councilmember for 11 years, said she’s confident the city made the right decision to use them again after removing them several years ago. “What I’ve seen at the intersections in question is that they’ve been a help in the past and they’ll be a help now. And they give the public confidence that there’s a safety measure in place, when due to tight budgets we can’t have police sitting there all the time.” Gardner said.
Gardner stressed her hope that the cameras will help control traffic as development continues near Tysons Corner to the city’s northwest and Bailey’s Crossroads to its southeast.
Both cameras will be along Route 7 at the intersection with Cherry Street and the intersection with Annandale Road. The camera contract will cost the city about $350,000 per year, according to the Falls Church Times. Citations are not expected to provide revenue to the city.
Recent studies looking into the cameras’ effectiveness reveal that it may be tailgaters who ought to be most vigilant when approaching the rigged intersections. A 2007 study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council found that rear-end crashes increased by 27 percent over a seven-year period at intersections that added a red-light camera. Typically, those crashes were caused by one car slamming into another that stopped quickly for fear of the camera.
But while rear-enders increased, crashes caused by running a red light decreased by 42 percent over the same period, the study found. In Northern Virginia jurisdictions that used the cameras in the early 2000s, the number of rear-end crashes increased to 4,168, up from 3,277 before the cameras. Crashes caused by running red lights decreased to 733 from 1,260 before the camera.
In general, crashes caused by red-light running can cause greater destruction and injury than crashes caused by slamming into the back of car. However, the study “did not show a definitive safety benefit associated with camera installation with regard to all crash types, all crash severities and all crash jurisdictions.”
