The grace period is over: Run a red light, get a ticket

Colorado Springs police call it a safety plan, but the grace period for getting caught by a red light camera is now over.

Lt. Jim Sokolik with CSPD said, “You take your life and someone else’s life in your hands every time you make the decision to go through that red light.”

For the last month, two cameras have been up at busy intersections to try and cut down on people running red lights and causing terrible accidents.

So during this one-month grace period, have people been able to brake before the red light?

Sokolik said not exactly.

“The data running from, I think it was, the 9th to the 3rd of May, we are looking at 564 observed violations and about 464 actual warnings went out.”

And when you break it down, that equals about 22 people a day.

“Just based on these preliminary number, this is a ridiculous number of people failing to stop for a red light,” said Sokolik.

However, more work still needs to be done before they can call these red light cameras a success.

“We need more months of data,” said Sokolik. “We are really going to need to look at this base number that we are building this first time and those numbers are still coming in. Once that’s done, we will have a base of data and then we will know more in the following months on how effective we are being.”

Two more cameras will go live before spring is over; those cameras will be at N. Carefree and Academy along with Dublin and Academy.