Chicago aldermen lacked the votes to repeal Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s lower speed camera ticketing threshold responsible for nearly $80 million in fines.
The Chicago City Council voted 18 “for” to 26 “against” repealing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s lower ticketing threshold for Chicago speed cameras, which have been responsible for 3.8 million tickets and $79.5 million in fines – but failed to show safety improvements.
The council referendum July 20 to repeal Lightfoot’s policy of issuing $35 tickets to drivers caught going 6-10 mph over the speed limit failed. She and her allies for months made political maneuvers to keep the highly lucrative policy in place.
City Council members led by Ald. Anthony Beale tried to raise the speed camera ticketing threshold back to 10 mph, citing an original Illinois Policy Institute investigation showing despite millions of tickets, the city saw a record 72 traffic deaths in the first half of 2022. The city during that time issued the equivalent of 1.4 tickets for every resident in the nation’s third-largest city.
“The data shows it’s not about safety,” Beale told his fellow aldermen. “It’s 1,000% about revenue.”
Speed cameras collected nearly as much ticket revenue in the 16 months after March 1, 2021, when Lightfoot lowered the limit, as the city generated in the three years before her ordinance was implemented. Numerous studies showed the deaths continued to climb despite $207,000 a day in fines.
Reports from Axios and CBS Chicago found traffic deaths around speed cameras increased by as much as 114% compared the pre-policy period, and 44% in areas not under surveillance.
Read on here.
Leave a Reply