Anonymous
10/17/2025 12:54
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Against my better judgment, I am going to try to explain this to you in very simple terms in the hope that you may understand. The table in the top half of page 44 shows a breakdown of traffic fatalities by "predominant cause". Each fatality is assigned one and only one cause - that is why the cells sum to the number of fatalities for the corresponding year. In 2023, speeding was determined by MPD to be the "predominant cause" of 22 of the 52 fatalities. The graph in the bottom half of page 44 simply repeats this information under a different title. The graph does not depict "speed-related" fatalities since fatalities can have more than one cause. For example, a driver may be both impaired and speeding. I am sorry that you have been misled by the title of the graph, but I hope now that better understand the data and will represent it more accurately in the future.
You don't have any evidence that any of the drivers in crashes that weren't labeled "speed-related fatalities" by the police were actually speeding. This is just someone you hope is true.
And you don’t have any evidence that they weren’t speeding. This is just something you persistently lie about.
You might as well be arguing that all these crashes were caused by drivers baking pies in tiny ovens in their cars while they were driving. There's no evidence of that, just like there's no evidence they were speeding.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 12:43
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Isn't it interesting that speed related fatalities increased immediately after cameras were expanded and the speed limit reduced?
In 2014, the city issued 359,795 tickets. The police reported 12 speed-related deaths that year.
In 2023, the city issued 1,844,265 tickets. The police reports 22 speed-related deaths that year.
Isn't it interesting how ticketing increased nearly six fold during that period, and yet speeding related deaths went up. Way up. It's almost as if one had nothing to do with the other.
Stop misrepresenting the data.
The numbers come from semiannual reports that the Department of Transportation sends to the city council and from the police department. You can look them up yourself. They're all publicly available.
I’ve looked them up and verified that the numbers do not actually represent the number of speed-related deaths. That is why I’m calling you out and will keep calling you out for the liar that you are.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 12:42
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Against my better judgment, I am going to try to explain this to you in very simple terms in the hope that you may understand. The table in the top half of page 44 shows a breakdown of traffic fatalities by "predominant cause". Each fatality is assigned one and only one cause - that is why the cells sum to the number of fatalities for the corresponding year. In 2023, speeding was determined by MPD to be the "predominant cause" of 22 of the 52 fatalities. The graph in the bottom half of page 44 simply repeats this information under a different title. The graph does not depict "speed-related" fatalities since fatalities can have more than one cause. For example, a driver may be both impaired and speeding. I am sorry that you have been misled by the title of the graph, but I hope now that better understand the data and will represent it more accurately in the future.
You don't have any evidence that any of the drivers in crashes that weren't labeled "speed-related fatalities" by the police were actually speeding. This is just someone you hope is true.
And you don’t have any evidence that they weren’t speeding. This is just something you persistently lie about.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:37
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Isn't it interesting that speed related fatalities increased immediately after cameras were expanded and the speed limit reduced?
In 2014, the city issued 359,795 tickets. The police reported 12 speed-related deaths that year.
In 2023, the city issued 1,844,265 tickets. The police reports 22 speed-related deaths that year.
Isn't it interesting how ticketing increased nearly six fold during that period, and yet speeding related deaths went up. Way up. It's almost as if one had nothing to do with the other.
Stop misrepresenting the data.
The numbers come from semiannual reports that the Department of Transportation sends to the city council and from the police department. You can look them up yourself. They're all publicly available.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:36
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Against my better judgment, I am going to try to explain this to you in very simple terms in the hope that you may understand. The table in the top half of page 44 shows a breakdown of traffic fatalities by "predominant cause". Each fatality is assigned one and only one cause - that is why the cells sum to the number of fatalities for the corresponding year. In 2023, speeding was determined by MPD to be the "predominant cause" of 22 of the 52 fatalities. The graph in the bottom half of page 44 simply repeats this information under a different title. The graph does not depict "speed-related" fatalities since fatalities can have more than one cause. For example, a driver may be both impaired and speeding. I am sorry that you have been misled by the title of the graph, but I hope now that better understand the data and will represent it more accurately in the future.
You don't have any evidence that any of the drivers in crashes that weren't labeled "speed-related fatalities" by the police were actually speeding. This is just someone you hope is true.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:30
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Isn't it interesting that speed related fatalities increased immediately after cameras were expanded and the speed limit reduced?
In 2014, the city issued 359,795 tickets. The police reported 12 speed-related deaths that year.
In 2023, the city issued 1,844,265 tickets. The police reports 22 speed-related deaths that year.
Isn't it interesting how ticketing increased nearly six fold during that period, and yet speeding related deaths went up. Way up. It's almost as if one had nothing to do with the other.
Stop misrepresenting the data.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:29
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
A lot more informative is the table on page 45.
Citations issued by MPD for speeding fell precipitously - and monotonically - from 2019 to 2023. As of 2023, MPD was issuing less than 9 speeding tickets per day across all of DC and just 28% of the number of speeding citations that it was in 2019.
On the one hand, speeding drivers in DC face an almost infinitesimal probability of being pulled over and issued a citation for speeding. On the other hand, speeding drivers are able to easily avoid camera tickets by braking just before they reach the field of view of the well-known locations of the 140 cameras - yes, there are only 140 - that gauge speed in DC. And should they forget to brake, the payment of the resulting fine is largely optional, especially for drivers with cars registered in MD, VA, or anywhere else in the country other than DC.
You are arguing here that speeding cameras haven't been effective in reducing crashes in DC and I'd largely agree with that for the reason that only the truly incompetent drivers are getting tickets and most of the drivers aren't bothered to pay them anyway. The cameras have no real impact on the speed of most drivers in most of DC.
What would have an impact is if there were a lot more cameras and/or MPD actually enforced the city's speed limits. If one or both of these things happened, we'd undoubtedly have fewer fatalities, fewer injuries, less property damage from crashes, and all of us who own cars registered in DC would be saving hundreds on their car insurance.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:18
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Isn't it interesting that speed related fatalities increased immediately after cameras were expanded and the speed limit reduced?
In 2014, the city issued 359,795 tickets. The police reported 12 speed-related deaths that year.
In 2023, the city issued 1,844,265 tickets. The police reports 22 speed-related deaths that year.
Isn't it interesting how ticketing increased nearly six fold during that period, and yet speeding related deaths went up. Way up. It's almost as if one had nothing to do with the other.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:17
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Against my better judgment, I am going to try to explain this to you in very simple terms in the hope that you may understand. The table in the top half of page 44 shows a breakdown of traffic fatalities by "predominant cause". Each fatality is assigned one and only one cause - that is why the cells sum to the number of fatalities for the corresponding year. In 2023, speeding was determined by MPD to be the "predominant cause" of 22 of the 52 fatalities. The graph in the bottom half of page 44 simply repeats this information under a different title. The graph does not depict "speed-related" fatalities since fatalities can have more than one cause. For example, a driver may be both impaired and speeding. I am sorry that you have been misled by the title of the graph, but I hope now that better understand the data and will represent it more accurately in the future.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:11
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Isn't it interesting that speed related fatalities increased immediately after cameras were expanded and the speed limit reduced?
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:09
Subject: DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Tickets issued don’t equal to tickets paid. Like pp said we only have few hundred thousand drivers in dc. Most of us pay tickets we get. We have to. Does MD and VA enforce DC issued tickets?
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:06
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Your position is that 42% of all fatalities is not a significant number? Please go and tell the relatives of the 22 people killed in 2023 by speeding drivers that there deaths didn't matter because they are "rare". You're sick.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 11:02
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
Reposting this from a few pages back because either you ignore everything that doesn't align with your existing beliefs or you have the memory of a gold fish . . .
There is plenty of evidence that traffic cameras reduce the incidence of crashes. Here are two studies for you to read:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-camera...nty-iihs-study-shows
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1963295/
If you are interested, I am sure you can find others.
Your argument that speed cameras in DC are not working because DC is still suffering traffic deaths in spite of the cameras is - and I'm sorry to have to put it this way - rather stupid. If the traffic deaths were happening right in front of the cameras, you may have a point, but they're not and you don't.
The vast majority of streets in DC have no cameras and cameras cannot serve as a deterrent to speeding in places where there are no cameras. The other problem is that many drivers are allowed to keep accumulating fines with no discernable consequences.
The driver who killed three people in 2023 on Rock Creek Parkway, Nakita Walker, had accrued 40 camera tickets in D.C. worth $12,000 over a 10-month period (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/...y-crash-suv-tickets/) and yet was still allowed on the road.
The driver who killed a pedestrian in Foxhall Village in 2024 had more than a dozen unpaid camera speeding tickets at the time of the fatal crash (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/...ruck-driver-tickets/). The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute that driver, so they are presumably still out there on the road racking up more speeding tickets and putting the rest of us at risk.
There are countless other accounts of pedestrians being hit by vehicles with huge amounts of outstanding camera tickets. You can read about them if you so choose here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/...ruck-driver-tickets/
If you don't like pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and passengers getting injured and even dying, you'd advocate for more speeding cameras and consequences for those who are caught speeding. Yet the only thing you seem interested in is removing speed cameras and absolving those who break the law from any consequences and so I must conclude that you have no concern whatsoever for the wellbeing and lives of other road users.
Is this a joke? This is not evidence of anything, except that you're a fkcingn idiot.
That probably is a bit too much information for your feeble mind to process.
I see that one of the links - which describes a study of speed cameras in Montgomery County - is broken. Here is the correct link: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-cameras-reduce-injury-crashes-in-maryland-county-iihs-study-shows
You'd think DC would provide an ideal test case of whether ticketing can make streets safer since we've had a 10 fold increase in ticketing over the past decade. So it doesnt inspire confidence when the only evidence you can muster is a 20 year old study of Barcelona and a brief blog post about Montgomery County that predates the explosion of ticketing in DC. You seem to be grasping for straws.
Straws? Is it that you want more studies? Here's some reading for you:
C. Wilson et al (2010). Speed cameras for the prevention of road traffic injuries and deaths. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004607.pub3
E. De Pauw et al (2014). To brake or to accelerate? Safety effects of combined speed and red light cameras. Journal of Safety Research. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2014.03.011
RA Retting et al (2003). Effects of red light cameras on violations and crashes: a review of the international literature. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389580309858
RA Retting et al (2008). Evaluation of automated speed enforcement on Loop 101 freeway in Scottsdale, Arizona. Accident Analysis and Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2008.03.017
RA Retting et al (2008). Evaluation of automated speed enforcement in Montgomery County, Maryland. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389580802221333
W Hu and AT McCartt (2016). Effects of automated speed enforcement in Montgomery County, Maryland, on vehicle speeds, public opinion, and crashes. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2016.1189076
ATE is effective in DC where it is. It is not effective where it isn't. DC has about 8,000 city blocks and 500 ATE devices. How do you expect ATE devices to be effective on the 7,500 blocks where there are no ATE devices?
Good to know about (checks notes)...Flanders, Belgium? Got anything remotely relevant to what's been happening in DC over the past decade? Anything at all? The city is surely desperate to show the millions of tickets it now issues each year isn't a waste of everyone's time, money and energy and yet the silence here is deafening.
Not surprisingly, you completely ignore the studies from neighboring Montgomery County.
There is also a DC-specific study here:
Retting, R., & Farmer, C. (2003). Evaluation of Speed Camera Enforcement in the District of Columbia. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1830, 34–37.
I’ve got to hand it to you, your commitment to a position that has been absolutely destroyed over and over by reams of evidence is truly something to behold.
It's hilarious that your evidence that the explosion of ticketing in DC reduces traffic deaths PREDATES the explosion of ticketing. Jeebus. You cannot make this up.
Your writing is a bit muddled, but you seem to be asking for evidence that exists only in the future. I don't think any of us have a time machine, so we can't help you out in that regard. But for the rest of us it is reassuring that DC transportation policy is guided by the evidence that exists currenty.
The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. It's continued ever since. That's far more data than necessary to show a link between ticketing and deaths. And yet you point to a study from 2003, when DC barely had any cameras at all. Because you're going to great lengths to cherry lengths to cherry pick.
This is getting tiresome.
There is a whole bunch of evidence in this 2024 report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bbd09f3d74562c7f0e4bb10/t/659c48193123442f2c5ad51b/1704740890154/Automated+Traffic+Enforcement+Systems.pdf
According to a Washington Post article in 2023, "a recent study of the District’s camera program, commissioned by DDOT, found that across 21 studied locations, speeding decreased, injury crashes fell by 30 percentage points and the number of citations dropped by one-third after a year."
Lots of other useful information contained here: https://ggwash.org/view/97212/smile-youre-on-camera-a-deep-dive-on-automated-traffic-enforcement-data
There is no grand conspiracy. You are just wrong.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 10:57
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
In 2024, DC doubled the number of traffic cameras and the DCAG started suing car owners with outstanding camera fines.
In 2025, traffic fatalities have fallen 56% year-on-year (https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/traffic-data).
Coincidence?
In 2014, the city issued 360,000 traffic tickets. Then it doubled the number of tickets issued annually. Then it doubled them again. Then it doubled them again. Then it increased that by 50 percent. During that period, the number of speeding deaths went down, then down, then up, then down, then up, then up, then down, then down, then up, then down. So, yes, it sure looks like a coincidence.
You still haven't explained why anyone should expect speeding cameras to be effective in reducing speeding in locations where they are no speeding cameras.
Also, your data is straight-up made up. The real data can be seen on page 18 of this report: https://www.dccouncilbudget.com/automated-traffic-enforcement
What the data shows is that the number of ATE cameras actually declined between 2015 and 2022 and the number of tickets issued was basically flat between 2018 and 2022.
Have you considered seeing a therapist about your pathological lying and general hatred of facts and logic? It might not be a bad idea.
Sigh. The data I cited is in the report you linked to. It's on the very page you pointed to, though you don't seem to realize that. Let me quote the sentence for you:
"Between FY 2014 and FY 2022, the number of ATE-issued tickets increased by 300 percent, from 366,610 to more than 1.4 million."
You can find data for subsequent years in the semiannual reports DOT provides to the city council.
The 300% increase was almost entirely between 2014 and 2017. From 2017 through 2022, the volume of ATE citations only rose ~15%. MPD-issued in-person citations fell off a cliff over the same period (and I suspect payment of ATE citations did as well), so meaningful enforcement if anything declined from 2017 onwards.
You also seem to have missed this section of the report:
"There is strong evidence that ATE speed cameras deter speeding within 250 meters to 2 kilometers (820 ft to 1.2 miles) on urban freeways, residential streets, school zones, and work zones, depending on various factors. In terms of reducing the proportion of drivers who exceed the speed limit, estimates of the impact of ATE speed cameras range from 14 to 88 percent."
What are you even talking about? The number of tickets only increased after 2022. It doubled (again) between 2024 and 2025. We're now up to 3.3 million tickets issued annually. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the data before chiming in.
And so we get back to the original point . . .
Yes, the number of tickets doubled between 2024 and 2025, after being flat since 2017. What happened to road fatalities between 2024 and 2025? They halved.
It’s a cold hard fact that speeding cameras save lives when used properly. Why do not want to save lives? Do you just hate people and want them to die?
What happened to road fatalities between 2023 and 2024? You know, the actual before and after years.
Playing such obvious games with the base year is a really bad look.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
We're only talking about speeding deaths, not total traffic deaths. Traffic cameras can't do anything about people killed by drunk drivers or or drivers having heart attacks on the road or pedestrians stepping in front of buses or cyclists doing crazy things. We only have speed-related death data through 2023. The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. Between 2014 and 2023, there is no obvious pattern in speed related deaths in this city. One year they go up, the next year they go down. They are totally uncorrelated to the increase in tickets.
Unlike Montgomery Country, there is no source of "speed-related death data" for DC. People have been telling you that ad nauseum, but as with just about every other point that has been made you refuse to accept basic facts and persist in repeating falsehoods.
The DC police release this information every year. They even have a separate bar graph on speed related deaths. See page 44:
https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/Annual%20Report%202023_READER_lowres.pdf
I assume you can read. Do you really not understand the difference between "predominant cause" and "-related" or do you just find it convenient to elide over this in pursuit of your sick agenda to delegitimize traffic control devices that save lives?
Look at the police report. It describes the numbers as "speed-related fatalities." Not sure what's ambiguous about that. I think you're just mad that deaths caused by speeding drivers are so rare.
Anonymous
10/17/2025 10:52
Subject: Re:DC traffic cameras issued 3.3 MILLION tickets last year
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Did you know there's almost no stop sign cameras west of the park? I wonder how that happens....
There's 17 speed cameras in Ward 3. In Ward 7, there's almost 60.
Listing this without listing data on accidents or fatalities isn’t that useful.
Traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities are FAR higher in ward 7 than 3. This isn’t the racist “gotcha” that you think it is.
Actually it is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
Accidents and fatalities are much higher in majority black zip codes. Should city officials defer to those who break the law or those who are victimized by law breakers?
The underlying problem is that road infrastructure is generally much more conducive to speeding in black majority zip codes. The solution is more traffic calming etc..
Accidents and fatalities are rare in every section of the city. The city should not bombard people with tickets that cost them lots of money and make no difference to accident rates.
No one is bombarding you. You are actively breaking the law. You can choose to stop.
It would make more sense if we just had the cops give out the tickets. So many of the camera tickets are bullshit-y foot fault tickets. It's just harassment.
The cops do not give a crap. They never did.
And what the is a foot fault ticket?? Did you follow the law or not? Sounds like no, but you want to whine about it
A lot of the tickets are for trivial offenses. For example you stopped at a stop sign, but the nose of your car was beyond the stop sign pole when you stopped, so they say you didnt stop at the stop sign.
The stop sign cameras record your speed going over the line and will automatically cancel the ticket if it's under a certain speed, specifically to avoid this situation. If the automatic cancellation doesn't happen for some reason you can appeal and presuming you were actually just inching over the line your ticket will be dismissed because they have not only your speed recorded but a video of the infraction that a human can review for an appeal.
People love to say "oh I was just doing this reasonable thing and the mean old speed camera punished me!" But in reality it's usually either a straight up lie or they have an utter lack of self-awareness of what they are doing in their vehicle, rolling through the stop sign at 8mph but in their mind they "barely inched over."
It would be great if it actually worked like this, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Most of the traffic camera tickets I have ever gotten (and there's been a few) are penny ante complaints about how I stopped but not in precisely the right place because my bumper was over the crosswalk or something.
That is literally how it works. It's right there on the DDOT website if you had ever bothered to take 2 seconds to look it up:
Drivers must come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. This allows the driver to look around and ensure that they have the right of way before continuing. The stop signs units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to make a complete stop at a stop signs.
The stop sign enforcement camera system predicts using advance algorithms, when a stop sign violation is occurring and captures the violation event with digital camera and high-resolution video.
Step 1 The first image of the violation is taken BEFORE the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 2 The second image is taken AFTER the vehicle passes the stop line.
Step 3 The license plate is taken from a close-up of the images captured.
Step 4 In addition, a high-resolution video of the violation event is captured as a validation tool.
Step 5 Additional data collected includes the time, date, speed, location, lane, and direction of the travel.
https://asc.ddot.dc.gov/
They send you a video when you get a ticket. No one needs to look anything up. You can see how silly the tickets are in the video they send you.
If the ticket is "silly," i.e. not video evidence of you breaking the law and deservedly getting the ticket, then you can easily get the ticket dismissed.
If the ticket is in fact video evidence of you breaking the law then the ticket is not "silly."
So what's the problem?
Tickets have increased 10 fold. They doubled in the past year alone. Last year there 3.3 million tickets for a city of 700,000. Speeding deaths have not gone down at all, despite the massive increase in ticketing. How is that possible? Lots and lots of tickets for trivial offenses.
You picked the wrong year to make this argument. Traffic deaths are down 60% year-on-year after the number of cameras were doubled last year. You need to find a new hobby.
The number of speeding related deaths have gone up and down each year, without any clear pattern. If increasing tickets by 10 times over the past decade actually made a difference, you'd see a pattern.
2023: 22
2022: 9
2021: 12
2020: 15
2019: 10
2018: 9
2017: 12
2016: 8
2015: 11
2014: 12
2013: 11
You can keep posting lies and I will keep calling you out for the liar that you are. You know that these numbers do not include many people killed by speeding drivers and yet you continue to claim otherwise. Why?
You can look them up yourself. They come from the DC police department. The reports are here: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/mpd-annual-reports
I hate it when people make me repeat myself and you are making me repeat myself over and over again because you insist on spreading misinformation.
It states very clearly in the main table on page 44 on the 2023 report that the numbers constitute the “Predominant Cause of Traffic Fatality”.
I cannot believe that you do not understand the difference between a factor being determined to be a predominant cause and a contributing factor.
Therefore, I can only conclude that you are deliberately seeking to mislead the public in service of your hideous crusade against speed cameras, which persists in spite of all evidence that they save lives.
Do you want people to die on the streets of DC? Is that your goal here?
Everything has multiple causes. There are multiple reasons why I had eggs for breakfast. But the police investigated these crashes. They interviewed people in the crashes. They interview people who saw the crashes. They examined the physical evidence. Then they reported the primary reason for the crash and that was used in some cases to put people in prison. You can pretend you know better than the people who actually did the work, but it seems like it would be better for everyone if you just shut the fkc up.
So you do understand how traffic cameras can be effective at reducing fatal crashes even though the number of fatal crashes is not changing in accordance with the expansion of those cameras? Because it doesn't sound like you want to admit that you understand that.
That said, it is kind of silly to expect that cameras will make a difference to how people drive across the city when there are only 500 cameras for 8,000+ city blocks and drivers by and large know exactly where the cameras are. Cameras aren't going to work in places where there are no cameras.
If the city cared about saving lives, there would be traffic cameras on every block. They are cheaper enough to buy and operate that cost can no longer be cited as a factor in preventing the city from acquiring more of them. With AI, the cameras could also catch not only speeding but also drunk driving, double parking, red light running and so on.
How wonderful it would be to live in a city where drivers actually obeyed the law.
You sound like Trump pretending that DC is a crime ridden hell hole.
The reality is traffic accidents in DC are rare. Very, very few people die in traffic accidents. The vast majority of people are safe drivers, just like the vast majority of people do not commit crimes. Probably because so few people die in traffic accidents, it's hard to move the needle in further reductions which is why the numbers don't change that much from year to year.
You can blanket the city with tickets, but when you're issuing 3.3 million tickets to a city with a few hundred thousand drivers, you're mostly just giving tickets to safe drivers who make minor mistakes. That has no impact on safety. It's just harassment. It's like Trump putting National Guard troops on every corner, giving everyone tickets for jaywalking and then pretending you're reducing crime.
Are you nuts? The tickets are going to drivers who are speeding at least 11mph over the limit through residential neighborhoods? Only a true buffoon would describe that as a “safe driver making a minor mistake”. That you believe that drivers who break the law and endanger others constitutes “harassment” shows just how deranged you truly are. That you are trying to devalue the deaths of hundreds of people who would have been with us today were it not for such “safe drivers” who made “minor mistakes” is ghoulish. Please go away.
There's a lot of streets in DC with speed limits that are so low that they are a joke. I drive on a lot of roads that, if they were in any other city, would be set at 35mph. DC puts them at 20mph, and then gives you a ticket for speeding for going 31mph, even though if that exact same street was in any other city, you'd be driving below the speed limit. A lot of what DDOT is just dumb.
DC reduced the speed limits to save lives. Because the evidence shows that reducing speed limits to 20mph saves lives, a lot of them. Here is the research on that: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752400152X
And what other cities do you have in mind? Maybe, Kensington, MD? The place where pedestrians are being killed left and right by speeding drivers (ICYMI: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1293666.page)
Why do you insist that people must die so that you can get to the next red light quicker?
This does not show that lives were saved in DC. Where’s the DC data that supports your thesis, because this isn’t it. I prefer specific facts, not some generic information.
Why do you think that the laws of physics are not generalizable to Washington DC? Support your reasoning.
Do you also doubt that Newton's law of universal gravitation applies in each room you enter because you do not have room-specific data that supports that objects in free fall accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 while you're there?
Per the other poster's logic, they would refuse a vaccine because there isn't a published double-blind randomized control trial study with them and only them as a subject attesting to the efficacy of the specific brand of vaccine at that very minute. It's amazing at how naturally they will dismiss basic logic to affirm their own crazy biases.
You can just say you have zero evidence that all these tickets have accomplished anything at all. In effect, that's what you've already told us.
There is evidence, you've just refused to accept it. We're still waiting for you to justify your position that the laws of physics do not apply in Washington DC.
There is no evidence, obviously. Over the past decade, DC has increased ticketing by 10 fold. We now issue twice as many tickets as Chicago, which is four times larger than DC. If there was a relationship between ticketing and traffic deaths, then traffic deaths would decline. They haven't. They're basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
Reposting this from a few pages back because either you ignore everything that doesn't align with your existing beliefs or you have the memory of a gold fish . . .
There is plenty of evidence that traffic cameras reduce the incidence of crashes. Here are two studies for you to read:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-camera...nty-iihs-study-shows
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1963295/
If you are interested, I am sure you can find others.
Your argument that speed cameras in DC are not working because DC is still suffering traffic deaths in spite of the cameras is - and I'm sorry to have to put it this way - rather stupid. If the traffic deaths were happening right in front of the cameras, you may have a point, but they're not and you don't.
The vast majority of streets in DC have no cameras and cameras cannot serve as a deterrent to speeding in places where there are no cameras. The other problem is that many drivers are allowed to keep accumulating fines with no discernable consequences.
The driver who killed three people in 2023 on Rock Creek Parkway, Nakita Walker, had accrued 40 camera tickets in D.C. worth $12,000 over a 10-month period (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/...y-crash-suv-tickets/) and yet was still allowed on the road.
The driver who killed a pedestrian in Foxhall Village in 2024 had more than a dozen unpaid camera speeding tickets at the time of the fatal crash (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/...ruck-driver-tickets/). The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to prosecute that driver, so they are presumably still out there on the road racking up more speeding tickets and putting the rest of us at risk.
There are countless other accounts of pedestrians being hit by vehicles with huge amounts of outstanding camera tickets. You can read about them if you so choose here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/...ruck-driver-tickets/
If you don't like pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and passengers getting injured and even dying, you'd advocate for more speeding cameras and consequences for those who are caught speeding. Yet the only thing you seem interested in is removing speed cameras and absolving those who break the law from any consequences and so I must conclude that you have no concern whatsoever for the wellbeing and lives of other road users.
Is this a joke? This is not evidence of anything, except that you're a fkcingn idiot.
That probably is a bit too much information for your feeble mind to process.
I see that one of the links - which describes a study of speed cameras in Montgomery County - is broken. Here is the correct link: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-cameras-reduce-injury-crashes-in-maryland-county-iihs-study-shows
You'd think DC would provide an ideal test case of whether ticketing can make streets safer since we've had a 10 fold increase in ticketing over the past decade. So it doesnt inspire confidence when the only evidence you can muster is a 20 year old study of Barcelona and a brief blog post about Montgomery County that predates the explosion of ticketing in DC. You seem to be grasping for straws.
Straws? Is it that you want more studies? Here's some reading for you:
C. Wilson et al (2010). Speed cameras for the prevention of road traffic injuries and deaths. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004607.pub3
E. De Pauw et al (2014). To brake or to accelerate? Safety effects of combined speed and red light cameras. Journal of Safety Research. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2014.03.011
RA Retting et al (2003). Effects of red light cameras on violations and crashes: a review of the international literature. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389580309858
RA Retting et al (2008). Evaluation of automated speed enforcement on Loop 101 freeway in Scottsdale, Arizona. Accident Analysis and Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2008.03.017
RA Retting et al (2008). Evaluation of automated speed enforcement in Montgomery County, Maryland. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389580802221333
W Hu and AT McCartt (2016). Effects of automated speed enforcement in Montgomery County, Maryland, on vehicle speeds, public opinion, and crashes. Traffic Injury Prevention. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2016.1189076
ATE is effective in DC where it is. It is not effective where it isn't. DC has about 8,000 city blocks and 500 ATE devices. How do you expect ATE devices to be effective on the 7,500 blocks where there are no ATE devices?
Good to know about (checks notes)...Flanders, Belgium? Got anything remotely relevant to what's been happening in DC over the past decade? Anything at all? The city is surely desperate to show the millions of tickets it now issues each year isn't a waste of everyone's time, money and energy and yet the silence here is deafening.
Not surprisingly, you completely ignore the studies from neighboring Montgomery County.
There is also a DC-specific study here:
Retting, R., & Farmer, C. (2003). Evaluation of Speed Camera Enforcement in the District of Columbia. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1830, 34–37.
I’ve got to hand it to you, your commitment to a position that has been absolutely destroyed over and over by reams of evidence is truly something to behold.
It's hilarious that your evidence that the explosion of ticketing in DC reduces traffic deaths PREDATES the explosion of ticketing. Jeebus. You cannot make this up.
Your writing is a bit muddled, but you seem to be asking for evidence that exists only in the future. I don't think any of us have a time machine, so we can't help you out in that regard. But for the rest of us it is reassuring that DC transportation policy is guided by the evidence that exists currenty.
The explosion in ticketing began in 2014. It's continued ever since. That's far more data than necessary to show a link between ticketing and deaths. And yet you point to a study from 2003, when DC barely had any cameras at all. Because you're going to great lengths to cherry lengths to cherry pick.
We have the direct data. We even know when each round of expansion has happened. If mass surveillance was effective we would see it in the data. But we don't.
It seems quite clear that at best there are diminishing returns to cameras and at worst there is a tipping point where increased expansion causes more harm than good.
500 speeding cameras for 8.000 city blocks is "mass surveilance"? This thread is comedic gold. Thanks for the entertainment!
The city issued 3.3 million tickets last year. That's twice as many as Chicago, which is four times as large. We only have a few hundred thousand drivers. We issue more tickets per person than virtually anywhere else on Earth.