Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh has sent a letter to the District Department of Transportation, looking to receive more information about the city’s highest-grossing speed cameras, and whether there is adequate signage and fairness in the speed limit itself around those cameras.
The city’s most active camera, on 295 just north of National Harbor, generated $13 million in fines in 2016. Last year was the highest-grossing year yet for the city’s speed camera program.
“We think this probe is long overdue,” AAA Mid-Atlantic’s John Townsend told WMAL.
Some speed cameras located in neighborhoods with high pedestrian traffic are useful, Townsend said, but on highways like 295, speed limits are artificially low, so much so that he thought it constitutes a speed trap.
“Don’t destroy the integrity of your program just to earn a fistful of dollars,” he said.
Townsend maintained the speed camera program, if administered fairly, should be losing money as more people learn about camera locations.
“You can entrap people with these cameras all day long when you have speed limits that are too low for the traffic engineering study,” he said.
Still, some are coming to the speed cameras’ defense, many who say they are valuable in neighborhoods that drivers tend to speed through with little regard for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
“There are real safety benefits to it,” said Cheryl Cort at the Coalition for Smarter Growth. “Photo enforcement is an important part of the toolbox that we have available to us to make our roadways safer for all users, including motorists.”
Cheh’s letter expressed concern about speed cameras located at the bottom of hills, thus catching drivers that failed to notice the gradual speed increase. Cort, however, said the onus is always on the driver.
“Motorists have a very important responsibility to pay attention to the speeds that they’re driving so that they’re not threatening other roadway users.”
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