Albany gives the green light: Red light camera fight shows absurdity of Albany control

After some significant lobbying, state lawmakers passed and this week Gov. Hochul signed a package of bills allowing NYC and various suburbs thereof to expand use of red light cameras. The city will be able to quadruple its program from 150 to 600 intersections — still only a tiny fraction of the city’s 13,000-plus intersections with traffic signals.

With the proper targeting — focusing on the most dangerous intersections without cameras that have had the highest rates of crashes — this can really move the needle to increase traffic safety, given the clear and convincing evidence that such cameras meaningfully reduce red light infractions, which are some of the most likely to lead to dangerous crashes.

We can celebrate the change while also pointing out the absurdity that NYC needs to go hat-in-hand to Albany to ask for permission to regulate our own streets, which also applies to the speed limit and cameras to catch speeders.

Perhaps the success of these new red light cameras will be such that the city will want to further expand the program, at which point we will once again have to restart the cycle of maneuvering and jockeying with legislators who see each new ask as an opportunity to extract their own priorities. It took years of consistent advocacy to win approval for NYC to be allowed to lower speed limits from 25 to 20 miles an hour, a simple shift that nonetheless has the potential to prevent serious injury and death on our streets.

Throughout all that, no one was ever really able to articulate an argument as to why the city shouldn’t get this authority; it would barely slow anyone down transiting in and through the city, nor really impact much of anything at all except to increase street safety.

What many state legislators understood — even though they couldn’t say so publicly — is the only reason this had to be fought for so vigorously is because it was a bargaining chip in the annual Albany-NYC showdowns. There, faraway lawmakers relish in flexing their muscle over the state’s by-an-order-of-magnitude largest, most populous and most economically productive city.

Winning these simple victories, which by all rights should be NYC’s decisions to make anyway, come at the cost of other concessions. They can be haggled over in exchange for something like continued mayoral control of schools, which is also something that should just be a default but instead requires city officials to burn time, effort and political capital. That would be annoying enough for any set of municipal policies, but is especially so for those designed to save life and limb on city streets.

Let’s not do this again. We know Albany likes to have these municipal operational items to dangle over NYC’s head, but perhaps the state Legislature would also benefit from leaving these matters to our own City Council and mayor and having more time to focus on other, big picture policy items. At the end of the day, this is simply a waste of everyone’s time and efforts, which we’ve gotten used to only because these are long-standing practices.

We don’t ask Albany to let us change how our trash is collected or which math curriculum to use, and we’d think it ridiculous to have to do so. Let’s standardize that manner of thinking.