Red light cameras are becoming more and more popular since they first appeared in New York City back in the 1990s. And research confirms that this is a very good thing when it comes to safety and saving lives.
A recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) revealed that red light cameras in 79 U.S. cities saved nearly 1,300 lives in 2014. This finding builds on a previous study showing that red light driving crashes decreased by 21 percent in cities that had red light cameras.
On the flip side, crashes caused by running red lights increased 30 percent in cities that stopped using red light cameras.
Despite the growing body of research showing that red light cameras do indeed save lives, the total number of communities with red light cameras fell to 467 in 2015 after peaking at 533 in 2012.
Learn more about these findings and numbers and how the IIHS calculated them by reading the source article on the IIHS website.