I found this site which lists the red light cameras throughout the nation. Red light cameras have been a big political thing here in Albuquerque because our current mayor had a bunch of them installed five years ago and it caused a lot of political uproar.
First, the fines were outrageous ($100 for first offense, $200 for second, your first born for the third...). This caused a lot of shouting and finally the state intervened and this year a new fee structure was implemented ($69 for running a red light regardless of how many offenses). The interesting thing about the state law is that it only affected cities with a population greater than 200,000. The second largest city in New Mexico is Las Cruces at 89,000 so it's obvious the legislators were aiming the law at ABQ but were too chicken to actually mention the name of ABQ in the bill (lots of Anti-ABQ bias in this state). The original version of the law also stated that a (large) portion of the funds go to New Mexico (the amount of States share got mitigate a bit by Mayor Chavez after he threatened to shut down the whole program and deny the state any money). The cameras made a lot of money for Albuquerque and the State wanted their piece of the pie (greedy bastards). Bill Richardson sponsored that bill (greedier bastard).
Second, many felt that drivers weren't given enough warning about the cameras so signs were installed and grooves put in the pavement (to make a loud sound when you drove over it) to warn the driver that they were approaching an intersection monitored by traffic cameras. It didn't stop people from speeding through the intersection or running red lights but it did stop all the whining (OK, some of the whining).
Third, if you want to dispute the ticket (which is automatically mailed to you with a picture of you running the light), you can't go to court. You have to go to a city controlled arbitration board which is notorious for denying the dispute. This was one of the reasons for the states intervention (of course the BIG reason was all that MONEY the cameras were generating).
As you can see, there was a lot of news stories, debate and controversy generated when Mayor Marty Chavez put up the cameras back in 2004. I have no strong feelings either way on the matter since I don't routinely speed, run red lights and I have yet to get one of these tickets (knock on wood). However, when I discovered the above site I was fascinated. I found a table that listed the number of red light cameras in each state and I wondered what the per capita red lights were in each state (number of cameras per million in population). So I pulled the data, used Wikipedia to get the population figures and came up with the following table (sorted by cameras per capita):
State Number of # Cameras
Cameras Population per million
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District of Columbia 56 591,833 94.62129
Delaware 65 873,092 74.44805
Maryland 327 5,633,597 58.04462
Rhode Island 40 1,050,788 38.06667
Illinois 452 12,901,563 35.03451
California 1217 36,756,666 33.10964
New Mexico 65 1,984,356 32.75622
Texas 700 24,326,974 28.77464
New York 504 19,490,297 25.85902
Missouri 141 5,911,605 23.85139
Arizona 152 6,500,180 23.38397
Hawaii 26 1,288,198 20.18323
North Carolina 179 9,222,414 19.40923
Ohio 211 11,485,910 18.37033
Iowa 55 3,002,555 18.31773
Louisiana 80 4,410,796 18.13732
Georgia 168 9,685,744 17.34508
Tennessee 102 6,214,888 16.4122
Washington 97 6,549,224 14.81092
Oregon 55 3,790,060 14.51164
Colorado 55 4,939,456 11.13483
Australia 217 21,468,700 10.10774
Kansas 20 2,802,134 7.137417
Canada 193 33,545,000 5.753465
Florida 84 18,328,340 4.583066
Nebraska 8 1,783,432 4.485733
Pennsylvania 42 12,448,279 3.37396
Wisconsin 16 5,627,967 2.842945
Mississippi 8 2,938,618 2.722368
Minnesota 14 5,220,393 2.68179
South Dakota 2 804,194 2.486962
New Hampshire 3 1,315,809 2.279966
West Virginia 4 1,812,035 2.207463
Kentucky 9 4,269,245 2.108101
Nevada 5 2,600,167 1.922953
Wyoming 1 532,668 1.877342
North Dakota 1 641,481 1.558893
Michigan 11 10,003,422 1.099624
New Jersey 9 8,682,661 1.036549
Massachusetts 6 6,497,967 0.923366
Idaho 1 1,523,816 0.656247
Alabama 2 4,661,900 0.42901
Utah 1 2,736,424 0.36544
Arkansas 1 2,855,390 0.350215
Oklahoma 1 3,617,316 0.276448
Indiana 1 6,376,792 0.156819
South Carolina 0 4,479,800 0
Connecticut 0 3,501,252 0
Vermont 0 3,501,252 0
Maine 0 1,316,456 0
Montana 0 967,440 0
Alaska 0 686,293 0
(Notice that DC, Australia and Canada were added to the list. I'd be interested in seeing any red light camera data on Mexico. I guess they don't have them - or they simply didn't release the data).
I'm not surprised that New Mexico is in the top ten. In fact, since all the red light cameras are in Albuquerque and the city has less than the third of the NM population, ABQ would be at over 100 cameras per million (of course, Los Angeles would probably be right up there too).
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