The USDOT, Speed Cameras, and Automated Corruption: NMA E-Newsletter #683


It didn’t take long after Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Transportation Secretary, introduced his department’s 42-page National Roadway Safety Strategy for people to grasp the importance of a tiny sentence buried in Note 3 on Page 28 of the report: “Promote speed safety cameras as a proven safety countermeasure.”

Protestations emanated from as far away as the United Kingdom, where the Daily Mail reports the ever-present cameras are widely despised. That uproar must get louder and more widespread here in the United States if there will be any chance of derailing the U.S. Department of Transportation’s plan to make speed cameras permanent fixtures on the nation’s roads.

There are plenty of reasons to join our UK brethren in hating speed cameras. Let’s focus on one that has proven to be a rot on society.

The widespread corruption that automated enforcement has instigated since coming to America has cut a wide swath of fraud, bribery, and convictions. When profitability is a primary measure of success for devices that, with a slight tweaking of settings, can exponentially increase the number of tickets issued and fines levied, scandal is sure to follow. And it has.

With due credit to TheNewspaper.com, which documented the long, sordid list of automated enforcement crimes since the early 2000s, here are just a few of the speed-camera-related atrocities for which society at large often ends up footing the bills. The crimeline includes several more instances of wrongdoing involving speed cameras and red-light cameras worldwide. The temptation to bilk the driving public in the name of profit is not uniquely American.

August 2020
Terrance P. Link, the state senator who introduced the bill allowing the installation of speed cameras in Illinois, is charged by federal prosecutors with fraud.

January 2020
Illinois state Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Martin A. Sandoval enters a guilty plea to the charge of accepting bribes from Safespeed in return for his work in killing legislation that would have banned the use of the automated ticketing machines. Sandoval died before sentencing.

May 2019
Washington, DC police Sergeant Mark Robinson is vindicated by a court decision that concluded the city retaliated against him after he blew the whistle on corruption in the city’s speed camera program.

January 2019
Maryland Office of Legislative Audits issues a report documenting contract irregularities in the statewide freeway speed camera program.

September 2017
Members of the new executive team at American Traffic Solutions are caught ignoring their own speed camera tickets.

June 2016
Xerox sues the city of Cleveland, Ohio, for failing to pay $9 million in speed camera fees after 78 percent of voters passed a measure outlawing the devices two years earlier.

March 2016
Automated enforcement company Redflex is forced to pay $3.5 million after being busted for using illegal robocalls to collect on unpaid speed camera tickets in New Mexico.

August 2015
Iowa towns are caught ignoring South Dakota law prohibiting the use of driver’s license information to issue speed camera tickets.

We could go on at length (and TheNewspaper.com does) with many more instances of speed (and red-light) camera-related corruption. The question to ask ourselves is why the federal government is poised to spend billions of taxpayer money funding an industry with a checkered history, built to profit others at the expense of the people.

Better yet, ask that question of Secretary Buttigieg. This newsletter and last week’s And So It Begins—Vision Zero from the Top Down: NMA E-Newsletter #682 provide additional information for challenging the secretary about his support of Vision Zero and speed cameras. The only way to stop the dotting of the US driving landscape with automatic ticketing devices is to let him know, en masse, that speed cameras are revenue generators that corrupt rather than enhance the advancement of road safety.

The Honorable Pete Buttigieg
U.S. Department of Transportation
1200 New Jersey Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20590

Email: DOTExecSec@dot.gov

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