A map depicting the number of violations per day per intersection. There's a larger, clickable map after the jump.

Updated

The city of Albany released the first batch of numbers related to its new red light camera system this week.

The APD reports that since the cameras started coming online in July, the system flagged 2,197 potential violations. After reviews by officers, the city sent out 1,356 citations. So about 38 percent of the potential violations were screened out by the human review.

As you've probably heard by now, getting tagged by one of the red light cameras (and the officer review) is a $50 violation (like a parking ticket). The legislation authorizing the system allows the city to place cameras at up to 20 intersections. (It's now up to 15 intersections, the latest coming online October 2.)

The city released numbers for each intersection approach being monitored by the cameras, so let's have a closer look at the numbers to see which intersections had the most violations...



Maps and tables above

The easiest way to walk through this is to just have a look at the maps and tables above in large format (click or scroll all the way up). We'll explain up there.

A few quick thoughts

+ So Everett Road/Watervliet Ave and Northern Blvd/Albany Shaker Road both stand out for high rates of violations. It's worth looking into what's going on in those spots and whether it has something to do with the design of the intersections or some other factor. Or maybe they're just high-traffic-volume spots.

+ Similarly, some of the intersection with high "false positive" rates are worth a look. Example: Westbound Western Ave at Russell Road had the second-highest false positive rate -- and it's that intersection that for so long has had the weird double "stop here" line.

+ Both mayor Kathy Sheehan and police chief Brendan Cox have repeatedly said the motivation for using the red light camera system is safety and a desire to cut down on red light running. But the cameras are also a potential source of revenue -- a point that critics of the system have often raised as reason to be wary of the city using it. The Sheehan admin had budgeted that the camera system would generate about $2 million in revenue for this year. And as the initial implementation of the system stretched longer into this year, that seemed increasingly unlikely. The mayor recently said the city is now expecting something like $200k this year. [@JCEvangelist_TU]

Making any sort of judgement based on the system's experience so far is... not a good idea. But just for the sake of some very rough idea, if the intersections represented above racked up violations over the course of an entire year at the same rate they have so far (which isn't a good bet because the rates are bound to change), it'd be worth about $586,000 in gross violation revenue. That doesn't count the fees paid to the red light camera contractor, a fee per camera per month that's not to exceed the fine revenue generated. [TU]

Earlier

+ Albany red light camera program set to start soon

+ Albany red light camera intersection map

+ On the road to Albany red light cameras