Washington, D.C., is on track to rake in $148 million from traffic tickets in 2016, a Tuesday report from AAA concluded.
“Those drivers who were chanting ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ a couple of years ago are probably regretting their words now. The speed camera program is back with a vengeance,” John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s manager of public and government affairs said in a statement.
The District’s speed cameras have issued more citations in the first four and a half months of fiscal 2016 than in all of 2014, AAA learned through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Approximately 365,000 drivers were ticketed from Oct. 1, 2015 to February 2016. The city was able to bring in $37 million in revenue from increasing the efficiency of the automated system.
“They are just really activating every camera that they have in place,” Townsend told WTOP in a separate interview.
If the current pace continues, the city will hit 1.4 million speed camera tickets and generate nearly $150 million in revenue by the end of September, a record for the police department.
In the program’s 15-year history, the District has taken in almost half a billion dollars — $449 million — from speed tickets and issued more than 4.5 million speed camera citations since the automated program was introduced in 2007.
