That's not an argument people usually make against red light cameras. The usual arguments are...

* Camera installation is usually accompanied by shortening the yellow light period to increase revenue, which leads to more accidents.

* Most red light camera tickets are for rolling right turns on red. Such a violation rarely leads to accidents. These tickets are more for revenue than safety.

The second point here is a big one. Quite a few cities in California make significant revenue off ticketing rolling right turns, because they can argue the vehicle code is ambiguous enough to let them ticket it under the infraction for running the light (which is $500 plus a couple hundred extra for traffic school if the driver doesn't want to get points on their license). There's a bill that's perpetually in and out of the state legislature to close that down and make it absolutely clear that a rolling turn is a lesser violation (one with a fine too low to be worth the cost of enforcement), but it mostly tends to get shouted down by cyclists who think the oversize fine protects them.

> "people are going to run red lights anyway, stop ticketing them"

Did you read the article?

The problem is that the speed limit doesn't correlate with accidents. The speed variance (or spread) however does correlate with accidents.

So, what the article says, very politely, is that the schmucks who regard the speed limit as an actual limit cause more accidents than the people driving at the consensus average.

And, just so you know, most people don't object to red light cameras for public safety. There are dangerous intersections where a red light camera would be quite appropriate.

However, much like speed limits, red light cameras seem to grow on revenue producing intersections with low fatality rates but a mis-engineered light sequence while somehow missing intersections which actually are low-volume but very dangerous.

> Ticket them and make money for the municipality.

Traffic citations should have the ultimate goal to increase the level of safety on roadways. Revenue should play no part in it.

A better proposal would be to remove all fines and court costs associated with a traffic citation and change the penalty to only be demerit points on the offender's drivers license. If they accumulate enough points, then their license is suspended. If they're caught driving on a suspended license, they're arrested and go to jail pending a hearing.

> Ticket them and make money for the municipality.

That is a bad idea, because then the traffic arrangements will drift to be optimized for revenue generation, not safety nor fluent traffic.

I think more in line with the article, if you found a street-light where 85% of people ran it, there is something wrong with the red-light, and it should be removed.

Or perhaps not removed and fixed instead.

> "people are going to run red lights anyway, stop ticketing them"

That's not what the article is saying. The best way to put it is to say that "people are going to run red lights anyway, so make the yellow light longer so that less people will run red lights".