Welcome to the Roadscapes Wednesday segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Roadscapes Wednesday will feature roads and infrastructure related topics. Geek Alabama Editor / Publisher Nathan Young is often called the “road geek” for a good reason, Nathan loves roads and loves talking about roads!
In Chicago, a driver enters an intersection on a yellow light that lasts just 2.9 seconds. Weeks later, a ticket arrives in the mail. Under the city’s old rules, that driver would never have been ticketed. That one tenth of a second added up to around 77,000 extra tickets and roughly $7.7 million.
Speed cameras are one of the most studied road safety tools we have. All 28 studies in a major Cochrane review found fewer crashes near them, and the number of American communities using them grew from 4 in 1995 to 338 in 2025. So why do so many Americans see them as nothing more than a money grab?
The answer isn’t one mistake. It’s a pattern of broken trust. In this video, we look at Arizona’s statewide freeway program that was pitched as a revenue generator, Chicago’s red-light camera bribery scandal and its quiet change to the ticketing cutoff, the voter backlash in Houston, Tucson, and Sweetwater, the Yellow Vest protests in France, and the new privacy fears around license plate readers like Flock. Then we ask what it would take for cities to earn that trust back.
Categories: Roadscapes Stuff
