The Speed Cameras Have Arrived, And Ticketing Begins Today

Well, the day has come. Starting today, speed cameras placed near schools throughout the city will begin ticketing people who are driving above the speed limit in school zones, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday.

City officials won’t release the locations of the new cameras, which were installed last September after New York State lawmakers passed a bill authorizing it. The “safety measure,” as the city is calling it, has been something former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration tried to pass for more than a decade, according to a city website.

As we reported last year, the bill is a five-year pilot program and it allows 20 cameras to be installed. As of today, the city installed six of them in the fall, but did not issue fines – only warnings. Now the cameras will issue $50 tickets for those who go faster than the 20 mile-per-hour limit of slow zones near schools.

The 20 cameras will be rotated around 100 schools that the Department of Transportation deemed to be danger zones based on their studies and findings. While the location of the cameras at any given time will remain a mystery, the list of target schools is available here.

“The cameras are mobile so we’ll be able to move them around and address high-speed locations that may change over time,” former Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan previously told WNYC. “Any school where there’s excessive speeding will be fair game. One of the deterrents is that people don’t necessarily know where they are.””

De Blasio also supports the “home rule,” which would allow the city to install cameras at their own discretion without having to wait for Albany to pass anything, a source of contention for the last mayor.