Generally speaking, the U.S. doesn’t care what happens to people who dare to ever leave their cars. Pedestrians are just asking for it. Unless we’re talking about children at school, in which case, the U.S. kind of sort of cares. For example, Albany, New York recently installed speeding cameras in school zones. As the Times Union reports, that didn’t exactly stop the school-zone speeders. In fact, one driver somehow managed to get 29 tickets in only 10 school days.
While that’s a lot of speeding tickets to get in less than two weeks, it also suggests they were at least aware of the speed limit in the school zone. It’s the driver’s responsibility to know how fast they’re supposed to be driving, but you would think a parent who didn’t realize they were speeding would have racked up 40 tickets over 10 days. That would be a ticket on the way to drop-off, one more on the way home, and two more during pickup. Alternatively, on the 11 trips where this hypothetical parent didn’t speed through the school zone, they could have been held up by other drivers going the speed limit.
It doesn’t appear that the $50 citation increases with the number of speeding tickets given, but that still works out to nearly $1,500 in speeding tickets in two weeks. Maybe they’ll stop speeding once they realize how much this is going to cost them?
Considering how many tickets Albany’s new speeding cameras gave out in that same time period, I’m not optimistic. School-zone speeders accumulated a difficult-to-believe 12,895 tickets in that 10-day time period, and that’s just since the city began handing out fines. Cameras still under the 30-day grace period added another 14,834 warnings to the list. It’s also important to note that these tickets aren’t for going a single mile per hour over the posted speed limit. Drivers were only ticketed if they exceeded 10 mph over the limit, or 30 mph in a 20 mph zone.
While drivers are certainly a big part of the problem, road design also likely plays a role. As City Treasurer Darius Shahinfar pointed out to the Times Union, a lot of the city’s schools are located off four-lane roads that drivers often take to get into Albany. So they’re wide enough that drivers are going to naturally exceed 20 mph unless the city installs additional traffic calming measures. Additionally, the intersection with the camera that issued the most tickets is near an elementary school that regularly sees a lot of congestion while parents are dropping off or picking up their kids, encouraging speeding when a little space opens up.
With citation figures that high, it’s also reasonable to ask how many of those tickets are actually valid. You can’t trust cops, and the companies that sell products or services to law enforcement are often at least as sketchy, if not even sketchier. At the same time, it appears Albany has at least tried to add some checks and balances to the system, requiring a police officer to view the footage and sign off on the ticket before sending it to the driver.
Unfortunately for taxpayers, the city doesn’t get to keep all of they money it brings in from those speeding cameras. In fact, it doesn’t even get a majority of it. For every $50 fine paid, $17 goes to the city, and $33 goes to the camera company. So while $200,000 in 10 days is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also still a lot less than the nearly $650,000 the guilty speeders will have to part with.
Maybe some people can afford to drop a few hundred dollars a week and don’t mind being ticketed, but it’s also important to remember that all of these tickets came from only eight cameras. Currently, the plan is to install 20 total, meaning that if they don’t learn to slow down in school zones, things could easily get very expensive. If that doesn’t stop them, then hopefully Albany has a plan to actually punish repeat offenders because your income shouldn’t dictate whether you’re free to put kids’ lives at risk or not.