The Speed Safety Camera Story
Speeding makes streets unsafe and unwelcoming, especially for our most vulnerable. This is why combatting speeding with every possible tool is a constant focus for TA. With low-cost tickets, guaranteed consequences, and no potential for bias, automated enforcement cameras reduce offenses, injuries, crashes, and fatalities. While TA has been pioneering the use of this technology since 1993 when we introduced the nation’s first red-light camera program in New York City, the last two decades of our advocacy has focused on the deadliest driving behavior: speeding.
TA first introduced a bill to bring speed safety cameras to New York City in 2003. It would take a decade of fighting to pass that bill — along with thousands of letters from activists and TA organizers rallying the support of the mayor, police chief, comptroller, public advocate, and New York City Council. In 2013, we secured authorization for 140 speed safety cameras installed in New York City school zones.
Those cameras were a life-saving intervention. In four years, traffic fatalities declined by 55 percent at camera sites. But those results were not enough to move a gridlocked state legislature. In 2018, political infighting led to a failure to renew the program. That summer, with every speed safety camera in New York City about to be turned off, TA and FSS sprang into action. We targeted elected officials obstructing the bill with powerful protests, including a 24-hour vigil and a marathon-length walk. Then, we upped the stakes — on two occasions, TA staffers and FSS members put protest signs around their necks and blocked streets until they were arrested. After 14 activists were put in jail, the obstructing senators relented, and the 140-camera program was renewed.
The following year, TA and FSS made a bold proposal: Every school in New York City deserved to be protected from speeding drivers. We then successfully persuaded legislators to increase the number of speed safety cameras from 140 to 2,000 — making it the largest speed safety camera program in the world.
In 2022, with that program again up for renewal, TA and FSS made another bold proposal: The cameras, which had only been authorized to operate during daytime hours on the weekdays, should operate 24/7.
It took two large-scale research reports, thousands of petition signatures, weeks of lobbying legislators, and countless meetings between activists and elected officials — but that life-saving proposal is now a bold mandate that no one is killed in a speed-related crash across the five boroughs. In 2022, TA and FSS successfully removed time and day restrictions from New York City’s speed safety camera program, securing 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation and more than doubling the program's impact.
