Last week, the Metropolitan Police Department posted an announcement to X: they had just impounded an Audi with Maryland plates parked on a DC street. The car had 893 outstanding tickets totaling over $260,000 in fines.
It was an egregious example of what has become a pattern in DC: a relatively small group of dangerous drivers with Virginia and Maryland plates are captured over and over again by the District’s huge network of speed and red light cameras, racking up tens of thousands in fines and then ignoring them.
Most drivers who get a speeding ticket in DC never repeat their offense. But the District has had trouble pursuing the most egregious repeat offenders. Less than one percent of tickets go to offenders who exceed the speed limit by at least 30 mph. But these drivers contributed to about 30 percent of all fatal crashes in one year.
The MPD can tow and impound their cars when they find them on DC streets, and the attorney general now has the power to sue out-of-state drivers over unpaid fines—DC sued one Maryland driver last year who owed over $168,000 and had 360 speeding violations—though the majority of the money from these suits hasn’t yet been claimed.
No amount of camera tickets can result in points on a driver’s license, because it’s impossible to know for sure who was driving at the time.
So how do you deter lead-footed drivers who don’t seem to mind accruing truly eye-popping fees for their speeding?
Priya Sarathy Jones, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, says DC should work harder to separate the question of revenue and fines from that of safety.
“There is no evidence that it is the monetary sanction that comes with the ticket that impacts the change in somebody’s behavior,” she says.
To illustrate this point, Sarathy Jones gives two examples: a billionaire driver to whom fines are inconsequential, and a poor driver who can’t afford to pay any fines at all.
“It’s an insurmountable number for one group and it is inconsequential to another group,” Sarathy Jones says. Either way, it’s a form of punishment that doesn’t necessarily change the behavior of an unsafe driver.
Studies tend to show that drivers respond to a higher certainty of enforcement more than they respond to higher fines. In other words, if you’re an inveterate speed demon, even if you’re not deterred by tens of thousands of dollars worth of tickets in your mailbox, you might change your ways if you thought your home state would actually enforce them.
The Washington Post reported that Mayor Muriel Bowser is working with Wes Moore and Abigail Spanberger, the governors of Maryland and Virginia, to find ways to make enforcement across state lines possible.
Of course, all of this depends on DC’s traffic cameras continuing to operate at all, which is an open question. DC has drastically expanded its traffic camera program in the past few years—from about 100 cameras in 2020 to 546 this year—and many local politicians credit them with saving lives. But that rapid proliferation, along with Mayor Bowser’s decision to redirect the cameras’ revenue into the general fund, gave political fodder to House Republicans, who advanced a bill to ban DC’s traffic cameras out of committee in March.
Sarathy Jones feels the city is overly dependent on the cameras for revenue, and that fines and enforcement aren’t a lasting path to the underlying issue of road safety. For that, roads must be redesigned to discourage speeding: speed bumps, curb extensions, narrower lanes, and safer intersections.
“In the last five years, we went from under 200 cameras to now almost 600 cameras, and that is a huge push towards enforcement,” Sarathy Jones says. “I am not seeing a parallel push towards engineering and design.”
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
