I-Team 8 investigates red light runners

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - You see it all the time on the road. A driver blows through a red light without a police officer in sight. You stop, they go. I-Team 8's cameras caught it happening in the area's most dangerous intersections.

We wanted to know why more isn't being done in Indiana to prevent red light running, especially since other states have the tools to make it happen. Keep in mind a thousand people die on US roads every year because somebody ran the red.

Robin Pickard doesn't want to be one of those statistics. But when another driver ran a flashing red light east of downtown, she almost became one.

"She T-boned me," remembers Pickard. "She sent me into this pole, and the fire hydrant and the signs."

Photos of her car show the force of the impact. An impact she's still feeling nine months later.

"I have this lump on my leg here from the steering wheel," she showed us. "Permanent back injury, permanent neck injury, I probably won't be able to go back to work."

Robin is one reason why we wanted to see how often drivers run red lights especially at the area's worst crossroads.

At 79th and Michigan Road, the metro's most dangerous intersection, we watched for half an hour as eight drivers ran the red.

Meridian and 116th Street is Hamilton County's most notorious intersection. The speed is 55 miles per hour.

We watched as a lone driver takes a full two seconds to clear the intersection after the red. And then we watched a commercial truck lumber through the turn lane long after the red. It's up to cities and towns to set the proper timing on traffic signals. The Indiana Department of Transportation monitors intersections with highways.

"It has a major impact on safety and the mobility in our road network," said INDOT Spokesperson Will Wingfield. "So we're aligning our practices to try to improve safety on our highways."

Of course, police don't have the manpower to monitor every intersection for red light runners. And we found police don't write many tickets for it.

In Fishers, I-Team 8 found violations for "disregarding an automatic signal" account for only about two percent of all tickets police write there.

Other states have adopted red light cameras, which sometimes records the violent crashes resulting from red-light running. The high tech devices record the license plates of red light runners so police can mail them a ticket.

Crash victim Robin Pickard favors that extra set of eyes.

"Really, it's hard enough to focus on your driving, you gotta watch them driving," she says.

The Indiana Senate approved red light cameras in 2006, but the motion failed in the House and Indiana's attorney general said giving local jurisdictions the right to use the cameras would violate state law.

At one time, nearly half of all states had the cameras. There are even online maps showing you exactly where they are. But public outcry has forced a half-dozen states to abandon them. One reason: critics discovered that some cities were shortening the length of yellow lights to catch more drivers and make more money in citations.

A lot of police departments value the red light cameras. A test of a single camera by Lafayette Police found as many potential red light violations in just one day as the total number of tickets they write in five months.

It's prompted a national safety group, the National Motorists Association, to lobby for longer yellows.

"Let's talk about safety, not about the money coming in from the cameras," says Gary Biller of the association.

Biller said more on their campaign can be found at shortyellowlights.com.

Yellow light time, usually between three and five seconds, is supposed to be set by traffic engineers using a complicated formula calculating velocity and stopping distance. Usually it results in about one second per 10 miles an hour. But the National Motorists Association recommends lengthening yellow time by half a second. In that case, the recommended time for a 30 mile per hour intersection would be 3.5 seconds and 5.5 seconds for an intersection of 50 mph.

A study done on the issue shows it works.

"Their conclusion was the number one thing you can do to reduce accidents and decrease the incidents of red light running is to increase the yellow time by as little as half a second," says Biller.

And when we timed lights at dangerous intersections, we found differences. We used a stopwatch and then checked the video frame by frame. Brooks School and 116th in Fishers and 38th and Emerson in Indianapolis, both 40 mile per hour zones, differed by seven tenths of a second. The Fishers yellow light time was a flat four seconds, while 38th and Emerson was 4.6 seconds.

It’s little more than the blink of an eye, but the kind of difference safety advocates say saves lives.