Union City red light timings

Union City is refunding over 3,000 red light tickets after it was discovered that the yellow cycle was set to only 3 seconds rather than the 4.3 seconds required for 45 MPH by State law. This was discovered after one Dave Goodson got a ticket and checked the timings for himself.

When first questioned by a reporter about the timing discrepancy, police officials said they believed the lights were set correctly and that Jocson and Dalisay simply had quoted Goodson the incorrect value. They promised, however, to investigate the matter.

The investigation revealed that the yellow signal was set too short at every photo-enforced intersection. Rather than place the blame on any one individual, the investigation pointed to a process of checks--any one of which would have pointed out the problem earlier--that all failed.

Foley said he and other officials were well aware of the minimum standards and had assumed that Jocson and Dalisay also knew them. Still, city engineers are required to provide a monthly audit of the signal settings. Those audits, which would have alerted officials to the problem, were never received, he said. By 10:21 a.m. last Saturday, all of the intersections had been set to the state-required standards.

There's no particular reason to believa that this is was anything but an honest mistake, but it's equally obvious that there's an agency problem here: the city makes a lot of money ($136 per conviction in this case) off of fines for red light violations and so has extremely little incentive to correct timings that are too short. To make matters worse, too short yellow timings are associated with increased collision frequencies [*] cameras are preferentially emplaced in intersections with high collision rates, which suggests that intersections with red light cameras are more likely to have too-short timings.