NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s budget proposal, includes a plan to increase parking meter rates across the city, a plan which the City Council scuttled once in January. The transportation budget also includes an increase in revenue from an expansion of the city’s red light camera program.
The proposal is the same as in the mayor’s preliminary budget, released last February. In Manhattan below 86th Street, meter rates will rise from $2.50 to $3.00 per hour. That change was not challenged by the Council and is likely to move forward smoothly. In the rest of the city and at municipal lots, meter rates will increase from $0.75 to $1.00 per hour.
Overall, the increase in parking meter revenue would raise roughly $20 million next year and $25 million after that.
Another potential controversy buried in the budget is a plan to expand the use of red light enforcement cameras. The number of intersections where the city can install cameras is limited by Albany, but this plan would add extra cameras facing the opposite direction at 20 locations that already have cameras. Red light cameras have been repeatedly shown to reduce crashes and save lives, so the expansion of the program should be a boon to safety.
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5 Responses
If the red light cameras work as I expect, they will eventually result in safer driving, thereby saving automobile owners money by reducing the number of accidents and the related costs, and the related insurance premiums, and the net savings will be in excess of the higher parking fees. I regret that I do not have any study or analysis to support this hypothesis.
And as we all know, if a red light camera saves a single life, it has saved the world.
Red light cameras and their timing (how long a yellow light) can either be optimized to maximize revenue or to minimize accidents.
Which goal is being pursued here?
Except for the fact that red light cameras have NOT been shown to reduce accidents…
No. 3: Do you know how long red-light cameras have been in use? I believe it has been less than a year, and it would take – this is only my guess – about five years for the full behavioral effect of the cameras to take hold.
@#4-
First of all, they have been in use much longer than a year. I’m pretty sure it’s up to five in the city, although I could be wrong.
Either way, I posted a list of links to studies that showed that cameras did not reduce, and in some case even increased, accidents. For some reason that list was not let through by the mods.