When students returned to campus this fall, more than 20 new video cameras, mounted inconspicuously atop traffic signals around campus, greeted them.

Very few students knew what they were, and the watchful eyes raised concerns over privacy and first amendment rights*.

“It’s creepy,” said Becky Monash, a hospitality business sophomore, as she stood in front of the six cameras at Farm and Shaw Lanes.

“They’re probably tracking us. … Probably a social study of some sort.”

The reality is less Orwellian.

The MSU Department of Police and Public Safety uses the cameras to measure and control the flow of traffic on campus. They are not monitored by humans, and they are not used to catch jaywalkers or issue speeding violations.

Instead, they recognize the volume of vehicles at an intersection and adjust the timing of traffic signals accordingly.

While the cameras can be hooked up to a video screen by a technician, they typically feed directly into a computer. The computer superimposes a grid on the intersection that is used to mathematically determine the presence or absence of traffic, according to Mike Rice, assistant chief of police at MSU.

Cameras have replaced magnetic loops as the favored method of traffic control because of their durability and reliability. The loops, which are placed underneath pavement to recognize the presence of vehicles, have a limited life span and are costly and difficult to replace.

Many other communities have adopted traffic camera technology. Two similar cameras operated by the Michigan Department of Transportation in cooperation with the City of East Lansing monitor traffic at the corner of Hagadorn and Grand River.

Traffic cameras are not new to MSU, but their numbers increased dramatically this year because of extensive intersection construction work performed over the summer.

The Lansing Board of Water and Light, which performs intersection construction for the university, installed the first traffic camera on campus at Farm Lane and Auditorium in 1999, according to Rice.

Sparty Secrets was unable to determine the cost of the cameras, which was rolled into the total cost of this summer’s construction work. The university spent approximately $1 million over the last 11 years on traffic control devices and engineering-related functions, according to the Governor’s Traffic Safety and Advisory Commission.

Most major intersections on campus now include traffic cameras, with the others soon to follow, according to Tom Maleck, an associate professor and university traffic engineer.

Maleck, in coordination with the MSU Department of Police and Public Safety, developed the MSU traffic master plan.

He has been working on the plan since 1995 and said it will not be complete until more traffic cameras are installed and the planned railroad overpass construction on Farm Lane is completed.

“At the present time, those signals aren’t operating at their fullest,” Maleck said, adding that it is difficult to program the computers effectively without campus-wide coverage.

“You have to put logic into the computer,” he said. “That is based on some understanding of what the traffic demand is. Our traffic demand is still changing. … We have very large traffic volume, large pedestrian volumes and over 600 events a year. It’s going to take some time for us to fully utilize the hardware that’s being put in place right now.”

The ongoing plan has received attention from Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose Traffic Safety and Advisory Commission honored MSU with the Richard H. Austin 2006 Outstanding Contributions to Traffic Safety award.

The award recognizes MSU for its successful management of large automotive and pedestrian traffic, noting that, “Cameras and communication hardware was provided for the traffic signals and a coordination plan was developed and installed. Traffic exiting campus is presently progressed at the expense of traffic entering campus, thus reducing vehicular backups in the presence of pedestrians.”

While the cameras themselves are innocuous, the failure to explicitly inform students of their purpose raised eyebrows.

“I don’t think there is that much concern about it,” said Rice. “This is not new. There are a lot of places that are doing this. It’s just a way of running a traffic light.”