Anecdotally, in the hellscape sprawl of Phoenix, lights tend to be longer in the outer reaches of the suburbs. The grids are larger, the roads are wider, and th

Anecdotally, in the hellscape sprawl of Phoenix, lights tend to be longer in the outer reaches of the suburbs. The grids are larger, the roads are wider, and there you must sit while each disparate line of cars takes its turn rushing off to wherever. And there is where I tend to see people brazenly running red lights. It seems to me that adding cameras, with their legal problems and perverse incentives to shorten yellow light times, leads directly to a worse outcome without treating any problem. Rather to make an actual scalable difference, it needs to be decided if these roads are going to be the highways they're mostly built as and treated like, or streets designed for people. Some certainly need to be highways, but if that is to be the case the designer needs to finish the job. Throwing a stoplight and a 45mph sign at the problem is a lazy solution that no one takes seriously precisely because it does not fit the application. Red light cameras similarly ignore the problem while adding somewhat to it.