Unpaid Tickets from Non-DC Drivers

[Anonymous]

A bus crashed into Ambar's Shaw location this morning after it was hit by a car. Pic from the Fire Department's twitter account:



Thankfully this happened around 7am and not during the brunch service, otherwise it could've been a mass casualty event.

Someone on Reddit looked up the plates bc they were visible in a pic and they are Maryland tags with nearly $1,000 in unpaid tickets, all of which are for moving violations. https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/1sc7qlb/metrobus_crash_shaw/

This is ridiculous. At what point is the city going to hold out of state drivers accountable and demand better for the people who actually live here. And I grew up in Virginia, I'm NOT saying Virginia and Maryland drivers are all inherently bad, but so many of these traffic fatalities are caused by out of state drivers with multiple unpaid tickets. In Virginia this would not happen because you either go to court to contest the ticket or you pay the fine by your court date. If you miss your court date and don't pay the fine, you face consequences.

I don't understand how we're going to get to zero pedestrian fatalities a year when this is allowed.

[Anonymous]

You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

+1, I'd love to see this. Real consequences that are at least *inconvenient* for these drivers in a way that might lead them to change their behavior.

One question I always have about the MD and VA drivers who have these long lists of unpaid DC tickets is: do they drive like this in their home state? If they do, they may already be driving without a license. But it happens often enough that I wonder if these drivers sometimes see DC as a place they can flout the law with impunity because... they can. This driver only had 3-4 unpaid tickets but we've seen drivers with 20 or more before. To what extent are they adjusting their behavior when they cross the line into the district knowing that the city won't/can't do anything to them?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

So your solution to scofflaw drivers is to … suspend their license?

Yes, that will surely fix things. Perhaps a sternly worded letter as well?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

+1, I'd love to see this. Real consequences that are at least *inconvenient* for these drivers in a way that might lead them to change their behavior.

One question I always have about the MD and VA drivers who have these long lists of unpaid DC tickets is: do they drive like this in their home state? If they do, they may already be driving without a license. But it happens often enough that I wonder if these drivers sometimes see DC as a place they can flout the law with impunity because... they can. This driver only had 3-4 unpaid tickets but we've seen drivers with 20 or more before. To what extent are they adjusting their behavior when they cross the line into the district knowing that the city won't/can't do anything to them?

Other jurisdictions don’t do automated enforcement like DC. They drive like maniacs everywhere. They only get caught in DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

+1, I'd love to see this. Real consequences that are at least *inconvenient* for these drivers in a way that might lead them to change their behavior.

One question I always have about the MD and VA drivers who have these long lists of unpaid DC tickets is: do they drive like this in their home state? If they do, they may already be driving without a license. But it happens often enough that I wonder if these drivers sometimes see DC as a place they can flout the law with impunity because... they can. This driver only had 3-4 unpaid tickets but we've seen drivers with 20 or more before. To what extent are they adjusting their behavior when they cross the line into the district knowing that the city won't/can't do anything to them?

Other jurisdictions don’t do automated enforcement like DC. They drive like maniacs everywhere. They only get caught in DC.

And yet it does nothing since there is no actual enforcement of out of state drivers, so it's pointless.

[Anonymous]

They need to start booting and impounding the cars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

I don't expect them to lock people up. Start with suspending licenses and since you're right, these people will continue to drive with a suspended license, move on to booting or impounding the cars.

+1, I'd love to see this. Real consequences that are at least *inconvenient* for these drivers in a way that might lead them to change their behavior.

One question I always have about the MD and VA drivers who have these long lists of unpaid DC tickets is: do they drive like this in their home state? If they do, they may already be driving without a license. But it happens often enough that I wonder if these drivers sometimes see DC as a place they can flout the law with impunity because... they can. This driver only had 3-4 unpaid tickets but we've seen drivers with 20 or more before. To what extent are they adjusting their behavior when they cross the line into the district knowing that the city won't/can't do anything to them?

Other jurisdictions don’t do automated enforcement like DC. They drive like maniacs everywhere. They only get caught in DC.

Huh? They get caught in other states, and it's actually enforced.

I got a traffic ticket in Fredericksburg. I was expected to be in court on a certain date or pay the fine by that date. There would've been consequences if I didn't. Virginia is perfectly capable of (rightly) enforcing drivers within Virginia; they can work with us to enforce Virginian drivers in DC.

[Anonymous]

I'm in MD and when I had DC fines, I paid. I felt terrible for going over the speed limit in a tunnel and not stopping completely at a stop sign! And when my husband had tickets in MD, he paid promptly too - like PP said, there's a court date and everything.

How come DC can't work with MD and VA on this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don't need a driver's license to drive. They aren't going to lock someone up in Fairfax County, Arlington, or Alexandria for unpaid tickets.

Legally you do. This is a stupid statement.

[Anonymous]

Hello Karens!

You know the vast majority of out of state drivers pay their tickets, right? We have oodles of data on who gets tickets and who pays them. You can obsess about some random guy, but you should recognize that you're obsessing about a statistical outlier.

41 percent of tickets go to Maryland drivers, and 38 percent of tickets paid are paid by Marylanders. Virginians are worse. They get 27 percent of the tickets and pay 18 percent of the traffic fines.

The people who pay the least are the ones from outside the DMV, i.e. tourists.

[Anonymous]

Virginia drivers are by far the worst offenders:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/03/28/speed-cameras-dc-scofflaws/

"Of the 103 vehicles with the most tickets in fiscal 2025, 67 have Virginia plates, 25 have Maryland plates, and 3 have D.C. plates."

[Anonymous]

I often volunteer at a local legal clinic, and I can tell you that DC does impound out of state cars with unpaid tickets. And I’ve seen amounts in the five figures of unpaid tickets. Most are from traffic cams, and usually the driver claims they never received the notice because they had moved and never updated their address with their state’s DMV.

At any rate, DC has a policy that allows them to sell the vehicle if the driver doesn’t pay the fines within a certain amount of time. If the car is registered in DC, they have to offer a payment plan. If out of state, they do not.

[Anonymous]

There are lots of incidents where people crash into buildings, and I think many of them turn out to be driver error -- mainly stepping on the gas instead of the brakes in a parking lot. This is why vision zero is dumb; you're never going to get down to zero pedestrian fatalities because drivers in this area are awful and make mistakes that have nothing to do with speed or road design. I think many incidents can probably be traced to cell phone use, but no one wants to bother enforcing laws against cell phone use, particularly in parking lots.