The Washington Post thinks a new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study favorable to the cause of traffic cameras should end debate about whether the cameras are a good thing. Radley Balko isn’t ready to buy it.
The Washington Post thinks a new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study favorable to the cause of traffic cameras should end debate about whether the cameras are a good thing. Radley Balko isn’t ready to buy it.
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The report on this study can be found here:
http://www.iihs.org/research/topics/pdf/r1151.pdf
In order for your death to count in this study, it had to be from “subset of these crashes that involved a driver traveling straight who was assigned the driver level contributing factor of “failure to obey traffic control devices.”
It is hard not to interpret this to mean that if a death resulted from a collision that was related to someone doing a premature panic stop on a yellow light, either a “rear end” pileup or loss of control from trying to avoid such a collision, it would not count for the purposes of this study.
Studies by IIHS researchers have been criticized in past academic literature reviews (e.g.: http://health.usf.edu/publichealth/fphr/volume+5.htm) for excluding accidents on the intersection “approaches” from their analysis, so I have to say this doesn’t surprise me, although I do find it disappointing.