Tuscaloosa is deciding which company will install cameras designed to catch traffic light violators.

TUSCALOOSA | Tuscaloosa is deciding which company will install cameras designed to catch traffic light violators.
Gatso, American Traffic Solutions and Redflex Traffic Systems have made presentations to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee.
“All three vendors provide a high-quality product and high-quality services,” said Acting City Attorney Tim Nunnally. “So we need to finalize the final request for proposals and then their responses, and evaluate them objectively.”
Nunnally and others within City Hall, including members of the Office of the City Engineer, are crafting camera system requirements that will be distributed to the companies sometime within the next three months as part of the requests for proposals.
The city’s staff will evaluate the responses and present its findings to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, which will then recommend a vendor — likely one of the three companies that addressed the committee — to the full City Council.
Cameras won’t be installed at intersections until late 2011 or early 2012, and the vendor and city officials said motorists would get fair warning that the system is in place.
A public notification is required by the Alabama Legislature, which passed a bill earlier this year allowing Tuscaloosa to install the devices.
The Legislature also placed limits on punishment. The minimum could be a warning, but the maximum the city can levy for offenses captured by red light cameras can be no more than $100.
That doesn’t include court costs, should the citation be appealed, or other fees, including the $10 fee that will be collected on each red light citation to cover record-keeping costs for the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center.
The exact fine associated with a red light camera violation is still undecided, Nunnally said. Ultimately, the City Council will have to decide the fee structure for each of the non-criminal civil violations.
Currently, only police officers witnessing a red light violation can issue a citation and it is considered a criminal violation. A basic offense costs a driver $156, according to the Tuscaloosa Municipal Court.
David Griffin, the city of Tuscaloosa’s deputy city engineer and chief traffic engineer, said city officials are still analyzing the city’s nearly 200 intersections with red lights to determine which ones will be best suited for the first round of cameras.
Griffin said city engineers are using an index that examines the intersections’ traffic volume, number of crashes, the number of crashes that involved property damage only, the number of crashes that involved injury (and the severity of those injuries) and whether the accidents resulted in a fatality.
“We’re also looking at how many of those are right-angle collisions — the ‘T-bone’ — which are normally associated with red light running,” Griffin said. “By using that index, we may find that intersections with higher number of crashes may not need (a camera) over the severity of crashes at others.”
The locations the engineer’s office selects will have to be filtered through the capability of the selected red light camera vendor, which will work with City Hall to choose intersections with proper lines of sight, lighting and other needs.
Griffin said the engineer’s office will continue to scrutinize the city’s intersections with traffic signals to come up with the areas with the highest need.
“We’re doing our homework to establish policies and procedures in the development, adoption and implementation of a red light running enforcement program,” he said. “The outcome that we seek is a reduction in red light running, injuries and deaths in our signalized intersections.”