Rush to add speed cams
A SPEED camera may soon be coming to an intersection near you.
Mayor de Blasio and the city’s transportation commissioner announced a push to bring more cameras to city streets Tuesday.
“There’s no question the speed cameras work. They’re a crucial part of our arsenal, and we need much more freedom to put them in so we can save lives — it’s as simple as that,” de Blasio said during a traffic-safety press conference in Brooklyn.
The city has the ability to use 140 mobile speed cameras at a time, within a quarter-mile of school entrances, on streets abutting them and during school hours. But Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said she’d ask lawmakers in Albany to allow New York to deploy the cameras at other times — and perhaps in other places, such as “high-crash corridors.”
Trottenberg said there were only three school-aged fatalities last year — “still too many” — and cited speed cameras as one reason why.
“We want to focus, again, on high-crash corridors,” she said.
But the request is likely to run into resistance in Albany, where some lawmakers are skeptical of speed cameras — along with redlight and bus-lane cameras — saying they are tools in a city cashgrab.
“This program is a gimmick to raise revenue for the city,” said Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island).
If the city cares about pedestrians, she said, it would add stop signs, install sidewalks, clear the snow at bus stops and go after drunk drivers. But de Blasio insisted the cameras have nothing to do with collecting the $50 fee. “If people don’t speed, we don’t get revenue — and we would be happy not to have that revenue,” de Blasio said.
The “sad reality,” de Blasio said, is tickets change behavior.
“I wish we could tell people ‘don’t do bad things’ and they just stopped doing bad things,” he said.
State Sen. Martin Golden (RBrooklyn) said he saw value in using speed cameras to slow down traffic, but thought it would be “very, very difficult” for the Republican caucus, which controls the state Senate with the Independent Democratic Conference, to support it because it could spur other municipalities to seek the cameras.