Final Report
December 2003
Ontario Ministry of Transportation
This study commissioned by Ontario, Canada’s Ministry of Transportation shows that those rear-end collisions can be fatal.
After evaluating the performance of red light cameras at 68 sites over two years, the report concluded that jurisdictions using photo enforcement experienced an overall increase in property damage accidents of 18.5 percent coupled with a 4.9 percent increase in fatal and injury rear-end collisions. Rear-end collisions involving property damage alone jumped 49.9 percent.
The study compared accident histories of intersections in Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Halton, Peel and Waterloo in the pre-camera period from 1995 to 1999 and the post-camera accident history from 2000 to 2002.
The report also concludes that there was an overall reduction in serious accidents and angle collisions. A closer look at the data found in this government-sponsored report show that intersections monitored by cameras experienced, overall, a 2 percent increase in fatal and injury collisions compared to a decrease of 12.7 percent in the camera-free intersections that were used as a control group (page 21).
In fact, the non-camera intersections fared better than the camera intersections in every accident category. The report’s overall accident conclusions would have appeared significantly worse had the camera-free intersections been excluded from the final results.
Click here for a full copy of the report.