Your news story \u201cRed-light cameras on duty May 1\u201d (Renton News, April 23) says Renton officials won\u2019t stop just because our Initiative I-985 uses the city\u2019s camera profits to reduce traffic congestion.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s fine. If politicians are sincere when they say their only motivation for red-light cameras is safety, then they shouldn\u2019t have a problem using the city\u2019s camera profits to pay for I-985\u2019s policies.<\/p>\n
State Auditor Brian Sonntag hired transportation experts to do a performance audit on the Department of Transportation. Their recommendations form the basis for I-985\u2019s policies. It opens carpool lanes to everyone during non-peak hours, requires local governments to synchronize traffic lights on heavily traveled arterials and streets and clears out accidents faster by expanding emergency roadside assistance. According to the audit, implementing its common sense recommendations will reduce traffic congestion 15 percent to 20 percent and provide $3 billion in economic benefits by simply utilizing more effectively our existing infrastructure.<\/p>\n
But these policy changes cost money and so we identified funds that\u2019d pay for implementing the audit\u2019s recommendations. One of those revenue sources are the profits from red-light cameras. I-985 allows cities to receive all the operating costs necessary to put up red-light cameras, but it dedicates their profits to the \u201cReduce Traffic Congestion Account.\u201d We think it\u2019s perfectly appropriate that the profits from these cameras go toward improving transportation.<\/p>\n
The overwhelming rejection of Proposition 1 last November shows us that voters want a no-new-taxes solution to our state\u2019s worsening traffic congestion problem. Using existing revenue, like red-light camera profits, is better than jacking up sales taxes or car- tab taxes, especially during these tough economic times. Without I-985\u2019s improvements to transportation, our state and our economy will literally grind to a halt.<\/p>\n
And with I-985 in effect, if Renton officials learn that red-light cameras don\u2019t make things safer (some studies show they increase rear-end collisions), profits won\u2019t deter Renton from taking them down.<\/p>\n
Tim Eyman<\/p>\n
Mukilteo<\/p>\n
I-985 co-sponsor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your news story \u201cRed-light cameras on duty May 1\u201d (Renton News, April 23) says Renton officials won\u2019t stop just because our Initiative I-985 uses the city\u2019s camera profits to reduce traffic congestion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13809"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rentonnews.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=13809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}