For over a decade Singapore has been operating a red-light surveillance camera system to enhance road junction safety. A study, based on a nine-year traffic accident count series, was undertaken to evaluate the impact of the cameras on casualty accidents at signalised junctions. The general accident characteristics at road junctions were first reviewed, followed by an examination of the accident patterns at a highly representative sample of 125 camera junctions. Comparative analysis was also performed on a sample of 42 high-accident-risk treatment junctions and a similarly matched sample of 42 comparison junctions. The study indicated that head-to-side collisions were the predominant junction accidents. An overall accident reduction of about 16 percent was observed for the camera junctions, with over three-fifths of the reduction in the head-to-side category. The treatment-versus-comparison analysis showed that the net reduction in the total accident counts was about 9 percent, with more than a two-thirds contribution from the head-to-side collisions. The results are found to be in agreement with findings contained in various studies reporting that the installation of surveillance camera systems can contribute positively towards safety improvements. (a)
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Ng et al. (1997) studied this question.