These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
So link it.
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.
Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
Edit: Throttled so editing to reply
Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds desperate to minimize their situation (for example without the funds to challenge the legality of polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts'). Although now political people are trying to game the system and shop very thought out cases to specific friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing precedent. After building enough such cases in lower courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level. Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.
It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with more money and or the huge disparity in power of the Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison' versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them), just wanting to go home as soon as possible.
And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent precedent from being set even when the case was won.
One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like. And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied' to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the scale and set the outcome.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on private dirt and gravel roads, etc.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.