The city of Medford has dismissed its case against chiropractor Glenn Gumaer for running a red light, saying it had decided to drop the charge “due to a technicality.” We suspect the reason is that, technically speaking, Gumaer was likely to win.
City officials released a video clip of Gumaer running the red light at Stewart and Barnett, noting that his car entered the intersection after the light had turned red, so he did run a red light. But the charge was dropped anyway.
Readers can draw their own conclusions, but the city did change the timing of that signal to lengthen the yellow light from 3.5 seconds to 5.1 seconds “to increase fairness” — and made the same change to two other signals. Only four intersections in Medford are equipped with red-light cameras, so the timing has been changed on all but one. Still, city officials insisted that all signals “were found to be legally compliant.”
But they changed them anyway.
Gumaer’s argument was that the yellow light was so short that he — and other drivers — had to either speed up or slam on the brakes when the light turned yellow to avoid a ticket. Unlike most states, Oregon law requires drivers to stop for yellow lights if they can do so safely.
It should go without saying that slamming on the brakes is likely to cause a rear-end collision, while accelerating violates the speed limit. In Gumaer’s case, he was making a right turn, so speeding up would have been unsafe as well.
Medford police Deputy Chief Trevor Arnold stressed that in his opinion, timing wasn’t an issue in the case because Gumaer clearly ran a red light.
If that’s true, then why did the city change the timing on not one but three signals?
Gumaer says he still plans to pursue a class-action lawsuit over the red-light cameras, and he has 200 plaintiffs signed up to participate.
The city maintains its red-light cameras have reduced crashes 19% over the past 10 years. That’s nice, but not if it came at expense of drivers unfairly cited for red lights they couldn’t safely avoid running.