YES
Emily Stein
President, Safe Roads Alliance; registered nurse; Medford resident
We have all seen or experienced those close calls when a driver blows through a red light just as you’re about to pull through. Or you’re in a crosswalk with your elderly mom and a driver speeds through at 40 miles per hour. I’ve picked my kids up from the bus and several times watched as drivers failed to stop when the stop arm was out and lights were flashing.
We have a big traffic safety problem in Massachusetts — and it may be getting worse. As one illustration, there were approximately the same number of people killed on Massachusetts roads in 2020 as in 2019, despite the sharp reduction in traffic due to the pandemic.
Clearly our current system of enforcement is not working. So let’s change it!
Allowing cities and towns to use automated enforcement, and in particular speed cameras, is one solution that Massachusetts should embrace. State lawmakers are considering three bills giving municipalities the option to install cameras that could issue citations for speeding, and such other infractions as failure to stop at a red light, or failure to stop for a school bus.
Studies found speed cameras in other states reduced crashes up to 49 percent and fatal and serious crashes up to 44 percent. Nearly 350 US communities use red light cameras and 169 use cameras to enforce speed laws.
Automated enforcement is beneficial for many reasons: It’s consistent and unbiased. The goal is to educate: Signage is required to warn drivers of the camera location. These cameras won’t put police and anyone pulled over in a dangerous position on the side of the road. And unlike police-initiated traffic stops, automated enforcement avoids the risk of racial profiling and escalation. Lastly, cameras only capture the license plate itself, so there is no infringement on privacy.
If you fail to see signs warning drivers of a speed camera, and get a ticket in the mail, it is likely that you wouldn’t speed through that area again. These cameras will help change our driving habits, and especially now, with an 18 percent increase in US traffic fatalities in the first half of 2021, our driving habits clearly need to change.
NO
Alex Marthews
President, Digital Fourth, a group advocating for digital privacy; Belmont resident
As a cyclist, I want our streets to be safe. However, there are trade-offs to consider, and replacing our current system with automated speed cameras is fraught with other dangers. We should not go down that road.
Historically, state lawmakers didn’t pass our speed laws with the thought that one day, technological change would let them be universally, rigidly, and digitally enforced. They could not have predicted sophisticated cameras would one day be able to recognize faces, or that automated license plate readers attached to cameras could give police a real-time narrative of where you go and when. New technologies disrupt informal understandings that underlie the current law. Right now, speeders will sometimes be pulled over and sometimes ticketed. That “sometimes” contains both good and bad.
Data have shown that as in other states, racial profiling in traffic stops is a significant issue in Massachusetts. But speed cameras will not diminish this problem. Automation doesn’t remove racism. Instead, it veils it in a deceiving neutrality. If we look into the decisions that lie behind the cameras, it is still police making them. They buy, monitor, and maintain the cameras, set the thresholds, and choose where cameras are placed. In Washington, D.C., when they shifted to automated enforcement, racial biases persisted. Cameras are a diversion from, not a solution to racism. Efforts to automate out the human element merely obscure it.
There are good reasons, too, for discretion in traffic enforcement. Human interaction adjusts for complexities that a camera cannot. Maybe a passenger is having a medical emergency. Maybe a speed limit sign was missing or obscured. Cameras sometimes even, as happened recently in the United Kingdom, capture and ticket cars that weren’t even there.
Humans can do better when it comes to traffic enforcement, but cameras are not the answer. If we are concerned about police harassing people in traffic stops, one solution would be to allow unarmed civilian parking and traffic enforcement. That idea has recently been proposed in Cambridge, in Florida, and other places. Rather than automating policing, it’s time to take a fresh look at what we expect police to do and not do.
As told to Globe correspondent John Laidler. To suggest a topic, please contact laidler@globe.com.
This is not a scientific survey. Please only vote once.
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