Anonymous wrote:The speed cameras only get you at 11 over. You basically have to be brain dead or a sociopath to get more than one.

Exhibit #1 of why we need to get more people out of their cars.

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.

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

Since to photo tickets don’t give points to the driver they are nothing like the deterrent of getting pulled over

What are you talking about? The tickets here are obscenely expensive. People probably don't pay because they're so expensive and often seem very unfair.

Anonymous wrote:I think the evolution of the cameras should be from revenue stream to identifying and restricting dangerous drivers. But I know that will cause a lot of privacy/due process problems. To me though, we already heavily regulate who can drive and under what terms and it feels like we should be taking more of those drivers off the road rather than just fining them.

Anonymous wrote:I speed a lot on DC roads — the speed limits have been lowered so much over the past few years to really dumb levels. Never gotten a ticket. I mean, how hard is it to learn where the cameras are and just slow down in those specific locations? The number of tickets just shows how dumb people are because they don’t want to spend any brainpower figuring out how where the cameras are. It’s really a stupidity tax.

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

That's because it's more crowded and more people speed there.

I can tell you that there is a speed camera on the section of Eastern Avenue I live near that has made a huge difference in my family's safety when we turn out of our neighborhood onto Eastern Avenue. Additionally, it's possible to cross the street out of our residential neighborhood and walk to our closest grocery store far more safely than before the speed camera. I'm grateful for it.

A quick glance at the data will show that road fatalities are much higher EOTR. The city responds to this by placing speed cameras EOTR. Is this racist or is it racist to not doing anything about the road fatalities?

The underlying problem is that road designs EOTR (and in poorer neighborhoods in general) are generally more conducive to speeding than in richer neighborhoods like Ward 3. The best way to reduce road fatalities EOTR is to fix that underlying problem.

But then you have Trayon refusing to allow bike lanes - the cheapest "traffic calming' measure - in his ward. So around we go.

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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.

That's because it's more crowded and more people speed there.

I can tell you that there is a speed camera on the section of Eastern Avenue I live near that has made a huge difference in my family's safety when we turn out of our neighborhood onto Eastern Avenue. Additionally, it's possible to cross the street out of our residential neighborhood and walk to our closest grocery store far more safely than before the speed camera. I'm grateful for it.

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.

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

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Anonymous wrote:The trajectory here is bananas. In 2014, the city issued 366,610 tickets. In 2023, it issued 3.31 million.

So we don’t know how much revenue is actually generated?

Last year they generated $200 million, which is not very much in the context of DC's massive budget.

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.

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

Since to photo tickets don’t give points to the driver they are nothing like the deterrent of getting pulled over

Anonymous wrote:

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.

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

Anonymous wrote:I’ve seen cameras placed in parts of Ward 3 at resident request only to be removed because they only showed a lack of violations. I guess the city needs the cameras to be cost effective.

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

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

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

Not really seeing a pattern.

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

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

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

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

Zero traffic cops. Zero.