Porcia London walked into the West Los Angeles courthouse ready to fight her red light camera ticket.
Unlike some drivers facing fines, the 29-year-old homemaker had not risked a deadly broadside by sailing through a stop light -- the principal safety problem cameras were intended to address. Her $159 citation came after she braked at a Manchester Avenue intersection, checked for cross traffic and made a right turn.
"I looked to make sure," she said. "I wasn't being unsafe."
In Los Angeles, officials estimate that 80% of red light camera tickets go not to those running through intersections but to drivers making rolling right turns, a Times review has found. As London realized that day in court, her turn was illegal because she did not completely stop before turning.
One of the most powerful selling points for photo enforcement systems, which now monitor 175 intersections in Los Angeles County and hundreds more across the United States, has been the promise of reducing collisions caused by drivers barreling through red lights.
But it is the right-turn infraction -- a frequently misunderstood and less pressing safety concern -- that drives tickets and revenue in the nation's second-biggest city and at least half a dozen others across the county.
Some researchers and traffic engineers question the enforcement strategy.
"I've never . . . seen any studies that suggest red light cameras would be a good safety intervention to reduce right-turning accidents," said Mark Burkey, a researcher at North Carolina A&T State University who has studied photo enforcement collision patterns.
Some county cities with photo enforcement opt not to target right turns. Others limit camera use for those citations.
"We're kind of very leery about right turns. . . . They're not really unsafe per se," said Pasadena's senior traffic engineer, Norman Baculinao. Only one of that city's seven camera-equipped intersection approaches is set up to monitor right-turn violations, he said.
"This is intended to be a traffic safety program. People who make right turns generally are going at a low speed," and resulting accidents tend to be a "sideswipe at most," he said.
Emphasizing those violations, Baculinao said, would be "more for revenue generation" than safety.
