Steve Burns
WMAL.com
ROCKVILLE – (WMAL) Montgomery County officials say they are satisfied with the effectiveness of various traffic cameras enforcing traffic laws, and those drivers appear to be getting used to being watched on the roads.
At a hearing of the county’s Public Safety committee, Police Capt. Tom Didone said there is evidence the cameras have changed behavior. Those sentiments were echoed by his colleague Richard Hetherington, who heads up automated traffic enforcement within the police department.
“The crashes at intersections are down 11 percent. (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) has done studies showing speeds are down in the county. Certainly, fatal crashes are down, on a bit of a downward trend,” Hetherington said. “It’s working. There’s no question about the fact that it’s working.”
Hetherington said he has seen the “temperature” of emails he has received from the public go down in the two years he has been in charge of the program.
“I think there’s a better public acceptance of all of these programs, because they do work,” he said.
Cameras are still being rolled out on school buses, snapping pictures of anyone who drives around a stopped school bus.
“In total since we started, we’re averaging about 178 citations a day,” Hetherington told the committee. “We’re just about at 39,000 total since we started the program.”
He said it is hard to discern a trend from the numbers, since more cameras are being added to buses regularly. However, he noted around 1,000 people have racked up more than one school bus violation.
“We will see a continual decline over time, and that’s what we want. Zero is what we want,” Didone said. “But we have to do better.”
Councilmember Craig Rice has been lobbying state lawmakers to increase the fine for passing a stopped school bus.
“That’s the kind of number that would be staggering in Annapolis, to hear that you’ve got a thousand people with multiple violations,” he said.
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