Albuquerque stacks three speed cameras behind its reward-the-compliant green lights

Portland's first test intersection on Southeast Powell Boulevard went from a 39 mph average to 30, which is the posted limit, according to Peter Koonce, who runs the city's signals and street lighting ^[9]; that is 23% off the baseline ^[1], and the square of the ratio, which is how kinetic energy scales, comes to 0.59 ^[2]. That second figure is arithmetic performed on two speeds rather than a crash count, and it should not be spent as though it were one.

Albuquerque's contribution to the file is a credit, not a measurement. The city attributes a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries on Lead and Coal avenues to the retrofit ^[2][5], its municipal development director Jennifer Turner says a driver learns quickly on that corridor that speeding means stopping ^[6], and a resident describes the middle-of-the-night racing and the car that ended up in a neighbour's yard as things that have stopped ^[7]. It is all plausible, but none of it is a before-and-after with volumes attached, and David Hurwitz, the Oregon State transportation engineering professor assessing the Portland deployment, effectively says so when he declines to draw sweeping conclusions and names more red-light running as the offset that would eat the gains ^[10][11].

The procurement case is thinner than the pitch. Albuquerque did not swap enforcement for signal logic; it set up three speed cameras near the rest-in-red stretch, and officials say that combination made the signal approach stronger ^[14]. The corridor with the crash claim attached therefore carries both lines, and no capital cost, operating cost or per-corridor figure appears anywhere in the account for either one ^[5]. So the cheaper-than-enforcement argument is at present an argument about mechanism, not money: signals hold red until a vehicle is detected and hand an early green to anyone at or under the limit ^[3][4], which means the sanction for speeding is delay, collected at the stop bar, with nothing to mail, contest or adjudicate.

The reason to watch this is that green time is an asset every city already owns and mostly gives away on a fixed schedule, and this configuration prices it: the offender pays in his own seconds, which is the only traffic penalty that never needs a collections process. Jay Beeber of the National Motorists Association takes the other side, arguing it is wishful thinking that drivers pay enough attention to learn the relationship, that they will arrive at a red and simply be frustrated without knowing why, and that an education campaign or something less intrusive would do more ^[12][13].

Rebecca Sanders of Fehr & Peers, who led a 2019 report at Arizona State University and Toole Design on speed management, found only Los Angeles trying rest in red among the cities surveyed, and only briefly ^[16]; seven years later ^[3] the named roster runs to five cities including that lapsed one ^[4], and how thin that roster still is says something about how far this idea has actually spread. What would falsify my read is narrow and checkable: if Albuquerque's crash drop does not hold once the three cameras are controlled for, the signals were the cheap sidecar to enforcement rather than a substitute for it.