Pols mull speed-cam substitutes

City lawmakers who lambasted Senate Republicans for the shutdown of speed cameras at schools hit a roadblock in their own street safety efforts Wednesday.

The City Council proposed bills aimed to crack down on reckless driving in the wake of Albany lawmakers failing to reauthorize the city’s speedcamera program for school zones.

But city Department of Transportation officials responsible for the street safety Vision Zero program panned the ideas.

“The speed-camera program complements these safety measures and protects people in a way the other interventions simply cannot,” Transportation Department operations chief Margaret Forgione said.

The speed-camera program allowed the city to put them in 140 school zones, but the ability to issue tickets to leadfooted drivers ended for most of the cameras on July 25. The city has 15 days left until its remaining 20 mobile speed cameras stop issuing tickets.

Since the July 25 shutdown, the cameras caught — but could not ticket — about 132,000 speeding drivers.

Council members proposed that the Transportation Department make a checklist of street designs, an annual study on dangerous driving, and require the city to boot or impound a car with at least five red-light and speed-camera violations in a year until they pass a driver safety course. Another bill requires boards that post speeds installed near every school.

Transportation officials opposed the bills, arguing that the city already gathers information and that creating a checklist would “add cost and delay” to completing Vision Zero projects. The department also said speed boards would cost $26,000 each, which could be spent on street redesigns.

Still, lawmakers ahead of the emergency meeting of the Transportation Committee argued that the measures are needed, while criticizing Senate Republicans who left Albany without passing a bill to keep the cameras on.