By Robert Hornak
If you’ve spent any time living or working in New York City you’re accustomed to the government thrusting its hand into your pocket every day in every way possible and taking a seemingly never-ending cut of your hard-earned money.
Just ask anyone who’s driven into Manhattan recently and been whacked for the $9 congestion tax just for the privilege of entering the lower half of the borough. Our government sets up the crisis of congestion by narrowing the streets, taking as many lanes away for cars as possible in favor of bikes, buses, and even dining in the middle of the street, to make getting around the city by car as difficult as possible. Then they claim to have the solution – which is always charging you more to do what you did before.
The experience with speed cameras has been very similar. Albany first introduced them in a pilot program in 2014. There were initially 200 of them, and the rationale was that they would be used exclusively around schools, to keep people from speeding down residential streets where children were likely to be walking or playing and only during the school day. And – as we suckers often say when these things are first introduced – that made perfect sense at the time. Let’s protect the kids.
But later that same year the city reduced the speed limit from 30 to 25mph. Nevertheless, we were protecting the kids. And the program seemed a success at first. The 200 cameras averaged 130 tickets a day each, catching people who were surely driving faster than they should have in residential neighborhoods and perhaps teaching them to slow down on local roads.
But it didn’t take long for the big spenders in Albany to see dollar signs and decide that if 200 speed cameras were good, then 2000 would be at least 10x better. And why limit it to just school zones in the daytime when there was so much money out there.
So, they rolled out more cameras all across the city, with many of them located on main multilane (the few still remaining) thoroughfares that people rely on to travel across the city every day. And, just last year, the city reduced the speed limit again, this time to 20mph on every street where the limit wasn’t otherwise posted. Albany big spenders were licking their chops at all the money they imagined pouring in from this huge expansion of the program.
But as often happens with bad Albany policy, things didn’t exactly work out as expected. After the 2023 increase to 2000 cameras, the average number of tickets fell to under 10 a day per camera. Did drivers suddenly slow down all over the city, or were they now placed in areas where speeding during most hours of the day was not an issue?
But these cameras are now on 24 hours a day and many on main city roadways. And what they wind up doing is catching a few people driving home later at night when the streets are mostly empty, and they drift a few miles an hour over the limit for which they then get a present in the mail a few weeks later in the form of a ticket that they must pay immediately or additional fines quickly start to accrue.
These are nothing more than speed traps, designed to take money from unsuspecting motorists who are no threat to public safety. Hard working average people just trying to survive. However, this can be corrected. The law that authorized speed cameras expires this year, unless it is renewed in the current legislative session that ends in June.
There is an argument for keeping them like they originally were sold to us, with 200 to protect kids near schools during school hours. That appears to have had the right impact. The rest is just another tax that they sneaked in on us because we gave them an inch and they took the mile. Now let them prove they can be trusted with that inch by doing the right thing now and returning the program to what we originally expected to get.
Robert Hornak is a professional political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @RobertHornak on X.
