City ponders giving cameras the red light

Costa Mesa is reevaluating whether it should run red light cameras at several of the city’s bigger intersections.

Since red light cameras first went up around town in 2003, the city has noticed an increase in accidents at intersections that are monitored with the cameras. However, while rear-end collisions are up 20%, broadside crashes, which often cause more severe injuries, are down 30%.

Officials look at this as a positive result.

But there are other pieces to the equation. When it first installed red light cameras, the city was hoping that it would neither cost nor earn the city money. The funds that Costa Mesa got from citations were supposed to offset the cost of paying the contractor that put up the red light cameras, Nestor Traffic Systems.

This has not been the case. In the last six years, Costa Mesa has paid Nestor $6 million and only received $5.7 million back in fines, for a net loss of about $300,000.

The city also says that Nestor’s system has been fraught with errors that the contractor is slow to repair if it gets to them at all.

“Over the last six months, the Costa Mesa red light camera program administrator has called [Nestor] on average two to three times per week to address problems with the system including performance issues, billing errors, inaccurate record keeping, yellow phasing problems and computer network issues. It has been increasingly more difficult to speak to a live person at [Nestor] as the company has decreased the size of its staff,” a city report states.

Cameras have been used to monitor some of the most heavily trafficked intersections in the city like Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue; Newport Boulevard and 19th Street; and Bristol Street and Anton Boulevard.

Even when a camera snaps a picture of a motorist running a red light, the fine that is assessed is sometimes difficult or impossible to collect because the image of the driver, which is required in addition to the image of the license plate, comes out blurry, according to the program’s administrators.

The City Council will take a look at the program Tuesday night and decide whether to keep Nestor, find a new contractor to provide red light cameras, or dispense with the program altogether.