The city of Denver will pause and reconsider a $1.2 million plan to add automated traffic enforcement systems to three intersections.

The reason: A councilman spent a Saturday with his spouse and a stopwatch.

Until Wednesday, the expansion of the “red light” program seemed like a done deal. But city officials asked to kill the proposal just as it reached the Denver City Council, saying they wanted to try other changes first. The re-evaluation could take up to nine months.

The camera system, first installed here in 2008, allows the city to ticket people who run through red lights or stop in crosswalks at several intersections around Denver. Police officials say that encourages safer driving. But Councilman Kevin Flynn was skeptical, arguing that the city should try other “countermeasures” first.

He wanted the city to try changing the timing of the traffic signals. A longer yellow light, he said, would allow drivers more time to decide whether they should stop or proceed through the intersection.

“Cameras are never necessary,” Flynn said. “If you set the yellow time appropriately, all the experience shows that you reduce red-light running to a point that putting up a camera would be pointless.”

Like many skeptics, he argues they’re mostly moneymaking devices for cities. But studies also have found they can cut back on some dangerous crashes, and the city has embraced them in its “Vision Zero” plan to end traffic deaths.

It seemed that Flynn wouldn’t win — at least until recently. Over the weekend, the councilman and his wife, Harriet Novak, headed out to several Denver intersections.

“We’re such a fun couple, this is what we did last weekend,” he said.

City officials said the three planned installation sites were hot spots for violations — for example, a video analysis found 151 red-light runners in a single day at 13th Avenue and Lincoln Street.

Flynn theorized that drivers might not have enough time to brake, especially with the avenue’s steep hill.

When he took out his iPhone stopwatch app, he found that the yellow light lasted three seconds. City officials confirmed that timing. Three seconds is the minimum suggested in federal standards, and a shorter window than other lights on the same avenue provide, Flynn said.

“Imagine all the needless tickets we would generate because we only give people three seconds to not cross that line,” he said. Another proposed site, 18th Avenue and Lincoln, clocked a three-and-a-half-second yellow. The third site, Alameda Avenue and Santa Fe Drive, offered a four-second window.

In response, city staff said that they would delay the expansion by up to nine months and try out longer yellows. The signal timing at 13th and Lincoln was last updated before 2011, according to city documents.

Skye Stuart, legislative director for the Hancock administration, said that nine months would be on “the long end” for the potential delay.

“It would be important to allow for any changes to conditions following signal re-timing to play out prior to reconsidering those particular intersections,” she wrote in an email. Staff will also look at other intersections that may not have yellow-light issues, she said.

The council unanimously rejected the proposed expansion after Flynn announced the city’s change of heart on Wednesday. Flynn also pointed out clerical errors that would have required the contract to be rejected.

Still, the city administration stands by the safety argument for red-light cameras. The cameras may reduce dangerous T-bone crashes by keeping red-light runners out of the intersections, though they also can encourage drivers to slam the brakes and cause less-dangerous fender-benders, as shown in studies.

Police say the cameras have worked in Denver. Each of the current camera sites has seen an overall drop in citations since 2008, although DPD data also shows an upward trend since 2015. In 2018, the cameras detected about 61,000 violations and issued 27,000 citations; not every violation can be ticketed.

The cameras already operate at:

Sixth Avenue and Lincoln Street

Eighth Avenue and Speer Boulevard

36th Avenue and Quebec Street

Sixth Avenue and Kalamath Street

The rejected contract also would have added a new photo van to catch speeders, which may come up again in the near future.

The expansion of the camera program would have cost the city an additional $1.2 million, for a total photo enforcement budget of $7.8 million over a five-year period. The system is a net moneymaker, though, because drivers pay millions in tickets each year.

Councilwoman Mary Beth Susman said she still supports the use of cameras. But, she added after the meeting: “I think it’s important to understand all of the possibilities to keep people from running red lights.”