they're banned on what ground?
"we really do want people to only obey the lights when an officer is in sight, we prefer them to run the red light and kill everyone around when he's not"
Among other things, cities were caught illegally shortening the yellow light period in order to increase revenue and putting cameras at intersections without proper traffic studies or in contradiction to traffic studies. Multiple cities have been found to be rubber stamping what the cameras churned out without actually having a police officer properly review each incident so recorded as the law requires. There were issues with bribes where the companies installing and operating them for the city were found to be paying off politicians. Further the units were inaccurate as hell, taking pictures when the vehicle in the intersection was there legally. Ask thomas - on one of his first visits to Dallas, we took him to a nearby intersection where he watched the red light camera system happily taking pictures of an empty intersection repeatedly, then taking pictures of traffic proceeding through the intersection legally, on the green light. Not kidding, he witnessed this with us (we already knew these systems were garbage, but wanted an independent witness.)
There was also a disturbing
uptick of crashes at intersections that had red light cameras installed; instead of increasing safety, cameras made it worse. People would be going at a rate that would take them into the intersection on a yellow and normally they could clear safely - the light turns yellow, they suddenly realize that the camera was there and they'd panic brake super hard for fear of a ticket and they'll get rear ended; in one case I learned about, the car driver dropped anchors in front of a dump truck - it didn't end well. Alternately, they would see the light go yellow and flatten the gas pedal to make it across the line into the intersection while it was still yellow because then they will get through and not have to stop or get tagged by the camera. Then they T-bone someone or plow into stopped or slower traffic on the other side of the intersection because they couldn't stop in time; when you consider that the most popular vehicle in Texas is a large pickup truck, you can see that this could be rather... messy.
Studies have shown that simply
extending the yellow light by a few seconds is actually more effective at preventing red light accidents than a red light camera in the US. It's basically free, but the installation of red light cameras often means the yellow lights get
shortened when the target revenue didn't meet expectations. All of these have been proven by studies or in court and I've referenced them on posts on FG before.
Keep in mind that the red light cameras we have (soon to be 'had') here
do not photograph the vehicle operator and any fines are sent to the registered vehicle owner regardless of who was driving. No points can or will be assessed, it's just pure revenue generation, a huge source of corruption and people got
really sick of it.
Edit: clarified legality of yellow light shortening - it's not legal to shorten lights below a minimum in this state along with others. Cities were caught shortening them - some below a half second total light time, well below the average minimum of three seconds.