Reply to DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The number almost doubled from the year before. DC now issues 8 times as many tickets each year as it did a decade ago. We issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is SO MUCH BIGGER! Pretty insane.

Hard to see what difference it's made to safety. Here's how many people the police say were killed each year in DC by speeding drivers:

2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11

Not really seeing a pattern. [/quote]

There aren't many cities in the entire world that have made more aggressive use of traffic cameras than DC. It's a legitimate question what, if anything, it has accomplished. [/quote]

Are there any other big cities that have zero traffic cops?  I think when people complain about traffic cameras in DC they forget that it's literally the only line of defense here.  It's not like a belt-and-suspenders approach where you can get a ticket for speeding/reckless driving/failure to yield from a real live cop, and also a ticket mailed to your house for rolling through a stop sign.

The cameras are all we've got, and they don't seem to slow the suburbanites down much anyway.[/quote]

It's not the only line of defense. DC has the biggest police force in the country, on a per capita basis. [/quote]

Zero traffic cops. Zero.[/quote]

That's a policy choice by our government that many of us think is pretty dumb. But regardless of whether the tickets come via cop or camera, DC is issuing millions more traffic tickets than other much larger cities. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before DC issues more tickets than NYC. [/quote]

I think we can safely conclude that drivers would accumulate a lot fewer tickets if there were any consequences whatsoever to not paying those tickets. Avoiding them is not particularly hard. Google Maps, Waze, and whatever other navigation apps are out there alert you to the presence of the cameras. And the cameras will only issue tickets to those speeding 11+ mph over the limit. The only people out there accumulating fines these days are those who really don't give a damn.

I drive in DC a lot and make a point of mentally noting the plates of drivers behaving incredibly stupidly and then looking them up later on the DMV database. I'm rarely disappointed - to the car, they've accumulated thousands of dollars in outstanding fines. Takes these drivers off the streets and the streets become a heck of a lot safer. As is also evidenced by the various fatal accidents in recent years - Rock Creek Park and Foxhall Rd to name two - caused by drivers with thousands of dollars in outstanding fines on their vehicles.

An easy fix would be to link MPD systems to the DMV's ticket database and give them the authority to impound vehicles with outstanding fines. As of now, officers are not alerted if a vehicle they pulled over has outstanding fines. And even if the MPD officer were to take the initiative and look up the plate via the DMV's website, it's not clear whether they would have any authority to do anything about it. Fixing this makes a lot more sense to me than having the AG sue a couple of drivers a year.

Of course, all of this presumes that the city government cares about making DC streets safer, which all evidence suggests is not a great assumption.[/quote]

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