Ever wonder, “What’s are the differences between traffic cameras, red light cameras, and others, such as speed limit cameras?”
These are all cameras that monitor our driving, so it can be difficult to keep track of all of them. Automated traffic enforcement cameras (ATECs) issue penalties and violations, while there are others that fall into different categories.
On this occasion, we are going to focus on the difference between the most known types of cameras, which is important to keep track of our responsibilities as drivers. Here are the main differences between traffic cameras, red-light cameras, and speed cameras:
What Are Red Light Cameras?
A lot of people don’t like red light cameras. Red light cameras are ticket-issuing machines that are set up at busy intersections. They can tell when a drivers enter the intersection at a red lights. If this is found, the traffic light camera will take a lot of pictures of the car as it breaks the law. A few weeks later, the driver or vehicle owner will get an unpleasant surprise in the mail. Note that the driver, not the registered owner, is the one accused of running the red light.
You can tell a red light camera from other camera systems by where it is— which is always near a busy intersection— and how it looks. There will also be a lot of red light cameras at each intersection so that they can see from a lot of different angles and then take photos or video of your license plate and the driver’s face. Most are also now using artificial intelligence to help the sensors read the license plate numbers and faces accurately.
No moving violations or criminal charges are made by the red light cameras. From a legal point of view, they are administrative violations, like getting a parking ticket. That means you don’t have a right to go to court and defend yourself against the police officer or law enforcement official who’s accused you. If you get a red light ticket in the mail and don’t pay it, you won’t be arrested, but your credit will be affected and blemish your driving record, which could then also lead to insurance companies to raise your auto insurance rates.
Are Red Light Cameras the Same as Speed Cameras?
Speed cameras are similar to red-light cameras in how they work. Speed cameras do the same thing, but they do so for speeding violations instead of for red-light violations, motivating drivers to follow traffic laws.
Speed cameras are usually placed in a different way than red light cameras and on poles above roadways, which are usually placed in the same place. Red light cameras are usually found in cities with a lot of people. On less crowded back roads and residential areas, you can find speed signs and not cameras where people have complained about speeding.
Speed cameras come in two types: fixed cameras and moving.
People can usually tell fixed-speed cameras from other types of cameras because they are almost always placed high up on separate poles next to the road, waiting to catch you going above the speed limit from above their elevated poles.
Mobile speed cameras are more difficult to see because they are not fixed to the ground. They can be on a tripod or inside of a van. It’s not safe to use crowdsourcing apps or databases that come with radar detectors to help you find mobile speed cameras because they move around a lot.
What About Traffic Cameras?
Traffic cameras are a video camera that looks at traffic on a road, overseeing general traffic conditions. Also called traffic sensor cameras or traffic monitoring cameras, they are placed on major roads like highways, freeways, expressways, and arterial roads. They are usually connected to each other by optical fibers that are buried next to or under the road. In urban areas, they can be powered by mains electricity, or by solar panels, or other sources that don’t have power outages.
Traffic cameras are not the same as road safety cameras. Those speed cameras are set up in specific places to make sure people follow the rules of the road by taking still photos at a much higher resolution when they get a trigger. They might be set up in a way that monitor traffic signals, traffic lights, busy intersections, school zones, pedestrian crossings, etc.
Traffic cameras are only there to watch.
They take lower-resolution videos all the time, often in full motion, but they can be remotely controlled to focus on an accident in the distance or at an angle that is normally outside their field of view, like a frontage road.
A lot of times, the video from a traffic camera isn’t kept or used to figure out what happened in an accident. These cameras aren’t part of any kind of law enforcement system and are used mostly as monitoring systems to measure travel times or study traffic. Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) Cameras are the same way but are used mainly to track the whereabouts of drivers.
Traffic Camera vs Red Light Camera: What’s the Difference?
The main difference between traffic cameras and red light cameras is that traffic cameras are used to generally monitor traffic, while red light cameras are specifically used to detect and issue tickets for vehicles that run red lights.