TThe city of Los Angeles has been selected as one of six cities included in the bill AB 645, which would authorize participants to start a five-year speed camera pilot program.
During a recent news conference at Glendale’s Eleanor J. Toll High School, Assemblywoman Laura Friedman joined local leaders to rally support for the program, which would allow the cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco and Glendale to install traffic cameras in school zones and areas with a history of speeding or crashes. The cameras would capture photos of cars traveling over the speed limit and allow cities to send speeding tickets to the driver’s home.
“A few years ago, unfortunately and tragically, a child was killed in front of these schools,” Friedman said. “We have too many deaths on California roads, not just a few years ago, but every day. And those deaths have skyrocketed, believe it or not, in the last few years. … We’ve seen an increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths in the state of California. We’ve seen an increase in street racing, reckless driving, and people driving with a wanton disregard for safety and life.
“There is a very human toll in terms of lives. Now we call them accidents when they happen, but most of them are not accidents. … They can be prevented by road design. They are preventable through education and they are preventable through law enforcement.”
Despite the focus on enforcement, Friedman explained that the new program was not designed to be “punitive.” Drivers must be going at least 11 mph over the speed limit to get a ticket from one of the cameras, and each driver’s first ticket serves as a warning. The second ticket will cost $50 for drivers who exceed the speed limit by 11 miles per hour with a “small escalator” for every additional 10 miles per hour over the limit. There will also be warning signs before drivers enter a speed camera zone, and tickets will not penalize drivers with license points.
“These are not meant to be cash cows for the cities; they’re not meant to generate revenue,” Friedman said. “If cities don’t reduce the amount of tickets they issue from the cameras, they need to make physical improvements or stop using them all together, because our goal is to reduce speeding, not issue tickets.
“All the money that is generated goes to the implementation of the program, and everything that is left over can only be used for physical improvements to these same streets to make them safer. … We’ve been getting support for this bill from lawmakers, but also from grassroots advocates and activists across the state of California who are simply saying, ‘Enough is enough.’
Glendale Mayor Dan Brotman added that federal guidelines for traffic control devices can limit a city’s ability to implement engineering changes that make roads safer. He explained that while city officials can continue to redesign and redesign roads, the planning and construction processes can take years to complete and cost millions of dollars in infrastructure spending. He called AB 645 a short-term solution.
“Right now, the easiest way to implement the technology is speed cameras,” Brotman said. “With AB 645, we will finally be able to test this technology. We don’t know what we don’t know, which is why this unassuming pilot is so valuable. It has all the safeguards anyone could reasonably ask for to ensure fairness.
“Speeding kills. We’ve known that for a long time. It’s the number one factor in whether a pedestrian or bicyclist survives being hit by a moving vehicle. … We also know that speeding doesn’t kill equally. It disproportionately kills lower-income people, children, and the elderly. … It’s more often those who need to walk, bike, or take public transportation to get where they’re going. These are real people, husbands, wives, parents, children, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. This is a problem we can and must address.”
After the implementation of 162 new speed cameras in Chicago, a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that speed camera violations were more likely to fine drivers from minority communities. Friedman said the program in AB 645 will be different.
“If you don’t take a very careful approach to this type of legislation, you can certainly have unintended consequences in this bill,” he said. “We have measures in place to ensure that they are distributed equitably in each different type of neighborhood in terms of income and ethnicity so that they are not all located in certain types of neighborhoods. We also have a long community process to use the camera so that the neighborhoods themselves can step in and say, ‘Yes, we have a problem in our neighborhood.’”
After passing the Senate Transportation Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee with approval, AB 645 will now move to the Appropriations Committee after the summer legislative recess, which runs from July 14 to August 14.
“We’ve addressed every concern that we think has been raised about this bill to the point where we think that when it’s enacted, it will serve as a model for similar legislation across the country,” Friedman said. “Speed cameras are being used in other states. They’re being used in New York City and many other places, and they’ve seen a dramatic decrease in speeding in the areas where they use the cameras. And they’ve also seen a dramatic decrease in injuries and deaths from speeding and reckless driving. I hope we replicate those same results here.”
