The Washington, D.C., area has inadvertently stumbled on a successful recipe for traffic safety: If the traffic doesn't move, not much can go wrong.
True, traffic moving at a molasses-like pace on the freeways does cause the occasional case of road rage and drivers take turns tailgating and cutting each other off.
But eventually one car gets off the freeway, and the other follows and then they slow to a crawl because the off-ramps are usually jammed. When the offending drivers get to the top the police are waiting because all the other drivers summoned them on their cell phones.
Nonetheless there are places where it's still possible to speed. I used to live near one of them, a six-lane avenue with a handsome, well marked and lighted circle surrounded by stately, mature trees. In spite of the signs and flashing lights, speeding drivers were constantly plowing into the trees, eventually girdling and killing them.
The loss of the trees left the stone fountain in the center of the circle -- and this is a big circle -- unprotected and the drivers took to hitting it, wrecking the stone benches and the edge of the basin.
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Finally, the local municipality installed speed cameras in the half-mile stretch leading to the circle. The fountain has been repaired; the new trees are doing fine; and so are many drivers and their cars who wouldn't otherwise be. The municipality made out like a bandit on the $50 fines. The money collected was restricted to road and sidewalk improvements and the municipality has been forced to find ever more creative way to spend it.
This has not endeared the town to surrounding communities and especially to the motorists. There is something drivers find unreasonably enraging about speed cameras and red light cameras. Maybe they're angry at having been inattentive enough to get trapped; maybe they're outraged at having been outwitted by a machine.
I found this out writing about a study by the Insurance Institute for Traffic Safety that found red-light cameras markedly reduce fatalities at intersections. Forget saving lives. Drivers still hate them.
The local paper was filled with reaction with someone called 1911a1 writing, "Red lights are only for unimportant people." This being Washington, maybe he wasn't kidding.
In seemingly every jurisdiction where they've been introduced they've been challenged in court as unconstitutional. That's the big trend now. If something annoys us -- ObamaCare, birthright citizenship, income taxes -- it surely must be unconstitutional.
A challenge in Tennessee got as far as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals where the judges found it was not an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. One of them wrote, "A system that simultaneously raises money and improves compliance with traffic laws has much to recommend it and cannot be called constitutionally whimsical."
It's hard to understand why there's an employment problem in this country since we take every little thing and turn it into an industry. There are websites that tell you where all the red light and speed cameras are. And there are applications that will have your GPS alert you as you approach their location.
The information goes both ways. The Washington, D.C., police post the location of their cameras on the department's website. But if you have to do that kind of research, why not just drive the speed limit and stop for red lights?
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McFeatters is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at mcfeattersd@shns.com .
