Saved by the Camera: How New York Can Use Its Red-Light and Speed Cameras to Prevent Deadly Crashes

New York City, enabled by state legislation, has long policed its roads with the help of cameras to catch vehicles running red lights and, more recently, breaking the speed limit. Such automated enforcement has helped the city reduce serious crashes by double-digit percentages, leading to a decline in fatal vehicle crashes from a modern high of 701 in 1990 to a modern low of 206 in 2018.[1]

However, the city has not adequately used the data gleaned from red-light and speed camera tickets to help predict and thus prevent serious crashes. Reckless driving has increased since early 2020: by 2022, traffic deaths had risen to 261,[2] 27% above the low, thus reversing a decade of progress, before rising slightly in 2023, to 262. This increase in traffic deaths was part of a nationwide trend of reduced policing and spikes in antisocial behavior and violent deaths. The city sharply curtailed police traffic stops beginning in 2020, for example. That year, the city conducted only 510,000 stops—barely half the 985,000 stops recorded in 2019. Through November 2023, traffic stops had returned to just 70% of 2019 levels.

As it continues to return police traffic stops to adequate levels, the city, aided by the state, should also use the information that its camera system provides to remove potentially deadly vehicles from the road.

One recent tragedy illustrated the human cost of failing to use camera data to remove reckless drivers from the road before they kill. In September 2021, a reckless wrong-way driver in Brooklyn hit and killed three-month old Apolline Mong-Guillemin as her parents wheeled her stroller along the sidewalk; the driver’s vehicle had previously racked up 92 school-zone speed camera violations and 15 red-light camera violations.[3]

This brief presents new NYPD data on fatal crashes in 2022, which make clear that vehicles involved in deadly crashes are disproportionately likely to have accumulated a long record of red-light and speed camera violations in the years and months before the fatal crash. Taking such vehicles off the road before their drivers kill themselves or someone else could prevent up to 47 car-crash deaths each year, thus saving the lives of 22 pedestrians, 21 motor-vehicle occupants or motorcyclists, and four bicyclists or operators of other two-wheeled motorized devices.

Using camera data to remove vehicles from the road after they rack up a series of traffic infractions would represent a natural expansion of the Broken Windows philosophy of preventive policing that was pioneered in New York City three decades ago, which emphasizes detecting, deterring, and preventing minor infractions before they become major ones. This approach would also modestly reverse a trend over the last half-decade to reduce or eliminate consequences for low-level lawbreaking, which thus is allowed to escalate into more serious crime.

New York State is one of just 22 states that allow for camera enforcement of traffic violations.[4] The state legislature, which governs most aspects of law enforcement and vehicle law in New York City, first allowed the city to police traffic violations via camera in 1994. The city’s red-light camera program now covers 150 intersections, 24 hours a day. In 2013, the state legislature also enabled the city to operate speed cameras in school zones during and immediately before and after school hours. As of 2022, the city had cameras in 750 school zones.

Under state law, tickets issued via red-light and school-zone cameras differ from tickets issued by police officers. Because cameras can identify only license plates, tickets are issued to vehicles, not to drivers. The tickets thus do not result in detrimental “points” on an individual’s driver’s license and do not form part of a driver’s record for insurance purposes.

Speed cameras issue tickets only if a vehicle is exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour. Each ticket is in the amount of $50, compared with a minimum $90 fine for a police-issued ticket; camera tickets also do not escalate with additional violations, as police-issued speeding tickets do (up to $600).[5]

Camera enforcement—along with street redesign, lower speed limits, and public education—has proved an effective component of New York’s decades-old program to reduce traffic deaths, which fell steadily in the city between 1990 and 2019. The city’s traffic deaths continued their drop even after 2010, when nationwide traffic deaths began to rise after decades of unsteady progress.[6] One city analysis found that red-light cameras cut “T-bone” crashes by 80%.[7] Another found that crash injuries fell by 35.3% in speed camera corridors, compared with 28.6% in noncontrolled corridors.[8] That study took place when the state legislature limited speed camera operation to daytime and evening hours; after the city’s expansion to full-time coverage in mid-2022, traffic fatalities in camera zones fell by 25%, outpacing the citywide decline that year of 1.1%.[9]

For the average vehicle, red-light and speed camera tickets are rare. In 2022, the city issued nearly 6.4 million speed camera and red-light camera tickets to fewer than 2.5 million unique license plates. A total of 4.9 million of those tickets went to fewer than 1.8 million unique plates registered in New York State. In that year, there were more than 2.1 million motor vehicles registered in New York City.[10] Given that some of those NYS-registered drivers were not city residents—(publicly available data do not allow for such a fine-grained analysis)—the average NYC license plate receives far fewer than one violation per year.

Most drivers learn quickly and modify their behavior after their vehicles receive just one or two tickets. Daily red-light violations have fallen by 77% over a quarter-century. During the period in which speed camera hours remained stable, speed camera violations at specific locations fell by 70%. In the year after the city turned speed cameras on 24/7, violations dropped 30%.[11] A city analysis of speed camera violations from 2014 to 2021, the first eight years of the program, found that 46% (more than 2.3 million) of captured total license plates received just one ticket, and 19% (944,484) received two tickets (Figure 1). Overall, 82% of license plates received four or fewer tickets.

This pattern held in 2022, the year studied in this brief. In 2022, 48% of unique NYS license plates that received a red-light or speed camera ticket did not receive a second ticket; an additional 21% did not receive more than two tickets. Overall, 86% of drivers received four or fewer tickets.[12]

Despite cameras’ success in deterring dangerous driving behavior, a small subset of motor vehicles are operated by drivers who do not learn from their previous red-light and speed camera tickets. During the first eight years of the speed camera program—in contrast to the nearly three-quarters of speed-ticketed cars whose operators changed their behavior in order to avoid receiving additional tickets—12% of vehicles garnered between five and nine tickets, and an additional 6% garnered 10 or more tickets.

As seen in Figure 2, this persistent minority of vehicles remained a problem in 2022. That year, 259,305 NYS-registered license plates received five or more tickets. Put another way, just 14.2% of ticketed NYS vehicles received more than 46% of tickets issued to NYS plates (Figure 3).

This disproportionality holds for all vehicles, including non-NYS vehicles (Figure 4).

To determine whether vehicles in fatal crashes, relative to the average ticketed driver, accumulated a disproportionate number of red-light and speed camera tickets before the fatal crash, this brief analyzes data from 142 fatal crashes in 2022 (all the crashes for which the NYPD has completed its investigations). These crashes, spanning from January to December, killed 142 people, constituting 54% of the victims of traffic crashes that year. Crash victims encompassed by the data set include 61 pedestrians, 29 motor-vehicle operators and 9 motor-vehicle passengers (for a total of 38 motor-vehicle occupants), 24 motorcyclists, 8 bicyclists, and 11 operators of other motorized devices, such as electric scooters. These 142 crashes involved 225 unique vehicles (including two-wheeled vehicles) with 191 unique license plates.

This brief matches license plates associated with fatal crashes with the history of red-light and speed camera violations associated with these license plates.[13] The goal is not to assign blame for any individual crash to any individual vehicle or the operator of that vehicle. Rather, this brief considers the data in the aggregate.

The State Department of Motor Vehicles, which issues license plates, does not reuse non-vanity license-plate numbers, meaning that a plate assigned to one vehicle is almost certain to belong to that same vehicle or its successor over several years.[14]

772 Red-Light and Speed Camera Tickets Across 111 Vehicles and 89 Crashes

In 89 (63%) of the fatal crashes in the 2022 data set, at least one vehicle had accumulated at least one red-light or speed camera ticket in the year or years preceding the crash. Of the involved plated vehicles, 58% (111) had accumulated at least one ticket. These vehicles had collectively accumulated 772 such tickets—133 red-light tickets and 639 speed camera tickets (see Appendix).

Ticketed vehicles involved in fatal crashes had received, on average, seven tickets prior to the incident. But the average by itself is misleading: as in the overall universe of ticketed vehicles, a disproportionate number of vehicles involved in fatal crashes accumulated disproportionate tickets. Red-light and speed camera tickets per vehicle involved in a fatal crash ranged from a high of 124 to a low of 1.

A relatively small group of vehicles in the data set received a disproportionate number of tickets. Of the 111 vehicles with tickets involved in one of the 89 fatal crashes with such a ticket history, 23% had received 10 or more tickets in the months and years preceding the crash. An additional 24% had received between five and nine tickets (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5

Ticketed Plates by Number and Share of Red-Light and Speed Violations Before Fatal Crash

Tickets	Number of Plates	% of Total
10+ tickets	26	23.4%
9 tickets	2	1.8%
8 tickets	2	1.8%
7 tickets	4	3.6%
6 tickets	5	4.5%
5 tickets	14	12.6%
4 tickets	10	9.0%
3 tickets	12	10.8%
2 tickets	15	13.5%
1 tickets	21	18.9%
Total	111	100.0%

Among these vehicles, speed camera violations were five times more frequent than red-light violations. Some 18% of vehicles involved in fatal crashes had accumulated 10 or more speed violations before the fatal crash. An additional 25% had accumulated between five and nine speed camera tickets (Figure 6).

Figure 6

Ticketed Plates by Number and Share of Speed Violations Before Fatal Crash

Tickets	Number of Plates	% of Total
10+ tickets	18	17.6%
9 tickets	1	1.0%
8 tickets	5	4.9%
7 tickets	7	6.9%
6 tickets	5	4.9%
5 tickets	7	6.9%
4 tickets	10	9.8%
3 tickets	11	10.8%
2 tickets	9	8.8%
1 tickets	29	28.4%
Total	102	100.0%

Among all ticketed vehicles—not just those subsequently involved in fatal crashes—only 3% had 10 or more speed and red-light violations, and only 10% received between five and nine tickets. But among ticketed vehicles involved in a crash, 23% received 10 or more such violations in 2022, and another 24% received between five and nine tickets.

A review of the vehicles involved in these fatal crashes, moreover, bolsters previous research on NYC traffic deaths, which has found that such vehicles are disproportionately privately owned passenger cars (including SUVs)—not trucks, taxis or for-hire vehicles, or government vehicles. A 2019 study, for example, found that 79% of pedestrian deaths were caused by private vehicles.[15] Similarly, as shown in Figure 7, of this 111-vehicle set, only 19 were trucks, vans, or government vehicles, and eight were for-hire vehicles (six) or taxis (two). There was one “unknown” vehicle, but the remaining 83—or 75%—were passenger vehicles (including SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks).

Figure 7

Vehicles in 2022 Fatal Crash Data Set by Vehicle Type

Type	Number of Vehicles with Tickets	Total Number of Tickets
2-Door Convertible	1	1
2-Door Sedan	4	36
4-Door Sedan	39	221
Box Truck	6	13
DSNY Garbage Truck	1	1
Dump Truck	2	4
Flatbed	1	3
Flatbed Tow Truck	1	3
Mini School Bus	1	11
Minivan	3	25
Motorcycle	7	29
MTA Bus	1	5
Pickup	4	12
School Bus	1	2
Scooter	1	7
Stake Truck	1	5
SUV	32	365
Tractor Trailer	1	5
Unknown	1	6
Van	3	18

387 Red-Light and Speed Camera Tickets Across 87 Vehicles and 74 Crashes

Vehicles involved in a fatal crash in this 2022 data set were disproportionately likely to have received a ticket in just the year preceding the fatal crash. A total of 87 plated vehicles across 74 fatal crashes had a ticket history within the 12 months leading up to the fatal crash, with a cumulative total of 387 such tickets, or an average of 4 per ticketed vehicle (Figure 8). Again, however, the average is misleading, because the number of tickets ranged from 1 to 41.

Once again, a disproportionate number of vehicles involved in crashes—relative to all ticketed vehicles, including those not involved in crashes—accumulated a high number of tickets in the year before a fatal crash. A total of 8% of ticketed vehicles involved in fatal crashes received 10 or more overall tickets, nearly three times as high as the general ticketed vehicle population. Some 24% of fatal-crash vehicles received between five and nine speeding tickets, more than twice as high as the overall 2022 ticketed population.

Figure 8

Ticketed Plates by Number and Share of Red-Light and Speed Violations in Year Before Fatal Crash

Tickets	Number of Plates	% of Total
10+ tickets	7	8.0%
9 tickets	1	1.1%
8 tickets	4	4.6%
7 tickets	4	4.6%
6 tickets	3	3.4%
5 tickets	9	10.3%
4 tickets	12	13.8%
3 tickets	11	12.6%
2 tickets	15	17.2%
1 tickets	21	24.1%
Total	87	100.0%

If NYC had been able to keep vehicles with five or more red-light or speed camera tickets off the roads in 2022, the city could have saved as many as 26 lives, out of the total of 142 lives lost in this 2022 data set, reducing the death toll by 18% (Figure 9). Extrapolating this 18% reduction in fatalities to all car crashes in 2022—including those not in this data set provided by the NYPD—would reduce the total death toll by 47. Even after accounting for confounding factors—such as the seven of the high-ticket vehicles in the data set with out-of-state plates, or the possibility that some of the crashes might have been completely unrelated to an involved vehicle’s ticket history (i.e., a vehicle with multiple tickets that is catastrophically hit by a vehicle with no tickets)—the data, in the aggregate, show great potential for preventing loss of life.

Figure 9

2022 Fatal Crashes Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
2	1	3	38	41
4	1	2	6	8
6	1	1	7	8
9	1		7	7
26	1	3	5	8
27	1	1	8	9
34	1	1	4	5
43	2		18	18
46	1		6	6
53	1		13	13
56	1	1	8	9
62	1	1	10	11
69	1	2	3	5
76	1	1	5	6
78	1	1	7	8
87	1		20	20
91	1	1	4	5
99	1	1	16	17
105	1	2	8	10
110	1		5	5
113	1		5	5
116	2	1	11	12
121	1		5	5
127	1	1	5	6
135	1		7	7
137	1		5	5

Of the 61 pedestrians killed in crashes involving 33 vehicles, 27 were killed by a vehicle with a history of red-light and speed camera tickets within the previous year. A total of 9% of vehicles that struck and killed a pedestrian in 2022 had more than 10 total speed and red-light tickets in the previous year; 9% had 10 or more speed camera tickets within the previous year. Some 27% had between five and nine speed camera tickets in the previous year (Figure 10).

Figure 10

Plates Involved in Crashes That Killed Pedestrians by Number of Red-Light and Speed Violations

Tickets	Number of Plates	% of Total
10+ tickets	3	9.1%
9 tickets	0	0.0%
8 tickets	2	6.1%
7 tickets	1	3.0%
6 tickets	1	3.0%
5 tickets	5	15.2%
4 tickets	6	18.2%
3 tickets	5	15.2%
2 tickets	4	12.1%
1 tickets	6	18.2%
Total	33	100.0%

NYC could have saved 11 pedestrian lives from this data set if it had kept vehicles with five or more speeding or red-light tickets (combined) off the road in 2022 (Figure 11).

Figure 11

2022 Fatal Crashes That Killed Pedestrians Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations(All Vehicles)	Total Violations
2	1	3	38	41
6	1	1	7	8
76	1	1	5	6
78	1	1	7	8
87	1		20	20
91	1	1	4	5
99	1	1	16	17
113	1		5	5
116	2	1	11	12
121	1		5	5
127	1	1	5	6

Of the eight bicyclists killed in 2022, one was killed by a vehicle that had eight speed camera tickets in the 12 months before the crash, and another by a vehicle with two red-light tickets (Figure 12). NYC thus could have saved at least one cyclist’s life if it had kept vehicles with five or more speeding or red-light tickets (combined) off the road in 2022.

Figure 12

2022 Fatal Crash That Killed a Cyclist Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
56	1	1	8	9

Of the 38 motor-vehicle drivers or passengers killed in this 2022 data set, 26 were killed in a crash involving a motor vehicle with a history of red-light or speed camera tickets within the previous year. Of 31 plated vehicles involved in such crashes, 9% had 10 or more total tickets, and 7% had 10 or more speed camera tickets. An additional 26% had between five and nine speed camera tickets. NYC could have saved up to nine motorists’ and passengers’ lives within this data set if it had kept vehicles with five or more speeding or red-light tickets (combined) off the road in 2022, or 24% (Figure 13).

Figure 13

2022 Fatal Crashes That Killed Motor-Vehicle Operators and Passengers Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
4	1	2	6	8
9	1		7	7
27	1	1	8	9
43	2		18	18
62	1	1	10	11
69	1	2	3	5
105	1	2	8	10
110	1		5	5
137	1		5	5

Of the 24 motorcyclist fatalities in this data set, 13 were killed in a crash involving a vehicle with a history of red-light and speed camera violations in the previous 12 months. Of the 15 plated vehicles involved in these crashes, 27% had accumulated five or more combined red-light and speed camera tickets in the year before the crash (Figure 14). NYC could have saved up to four motorcyclists’ lives if it had kept vehicles with five or more speeding or red-light tickets (combined) off the road in 2022, as well as the life of one operator of another motorized device, such as an e-scooter (Figure 15).

Figure 14

2022 Fatal Crashes That Killed Motorcyclists Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
26	1	3	5	8
34	1	1	4	5
46	1		6	6
135	1		7	7

Figure 15

2022 Fatal Crash That Killed Operator of Another Motorized Device Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
53	1	0	13	13

Of 21 crashes in which only one motor vehicle was involved, and in which the fatality was an occupant of that motor vehicle, three involved a vehicle with a history of five or more red-light and speed camera violations in the previous 12 months (Figure 16).

Figure 16

2022 Single-Vehicle Fatal Crashes Involving at Least One Vehicle with Five or More Tickets

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
4	1	2	6	8
9	1		7	7
105	1	2	8	10

The persistent danger posed by a core group of offending vehicles is perhaps best demonstrated by the number of vehicles that accumulate red-light and speed camera tickets after their involvement in a fatal crash. Thirty-nine separate motor vehicles have collectively accumulated 123 tickets in the months and years after their fatal-crash involvement (through October 26, 2023): 97 speed camera tickets and 26 red-light tickets. Two such vehicles have accumulated 10 or more speed or red-light tickets since their fatal crash; an additional five vehicles have accumulated between five and nine tickets since their fatal crash (Figure 17).

Figure 17

Vehicles Accumulating Tickets After a Fatal Crash by Number of Red-Light and Speed Violations

Tickets	Number of Plates	% of Total
10+ tickets	2	5.1%
9 tickets	0	0.0%
8 tickets	0	0.0%
7 tickets	0	0.0%
6 tickets	3	7.7%
5 tickets	2	5.1%
4 tickets	5	12.8%
3 tickets	5	12.8%
2 tickets	6	15.4%
1 tickets	16	41.0%
Total	39	100.0%

Across this data set of 142 crashes and 142 fatalities, keeping motor vehicles with five or more red-light or speed camera violations within one year off the road would have saved 26 lives.

If this 18% reduction in fatalities is extrapolated to all 261 motor-vehicle deaths in 2022, such a measure could have saved 47 lives that year (Figure 18).

Figure 18

Potential Lives Saved by Removing Vehicles with Five or More Tickets Within a Year

	Fatalities in dataset	Potential lives saved	Fatalities if vehicle with 5+ tickets in one year had been removed from road	Potential percent decline
Pedestrian	61	11	50	–18.0%
Motorist/ motorcycle	62	13	49	–21.0%
Bicyclist	8	1	7	–12.5%
Other motorized operator	11	1	10	–9.1%
Total	142	26	117	–17.6%
			Data contains a discrepancy of 1 due to rounding.
	Total fatalities in 2022	Potential lives saved	Total fatalities extrapolation with 5+ annual violator crashes removed	Potential percent decline
Pedestrian	121	22	99	–18.0%
Motorist/ motorcycle	100	21	79	–21.0%
Bicyclist	18	2	16	–12.5%
Other motorized operator	21	2	19	–9.1%
Total	260	47	213	–18.1%

New York’s policy goal should be to take vehicles (with the exception of special-purpose emergency vehicles such as ambulances) that have accumulated five or more speed or red-light tickets within one year off the road. To that end, the city should deter drivers of such vehicles from accumulating five or more tickets in the first place. Several policy changes would help in such a goal, but nearly all of them would require enabling state legislation.

Escalating fines after the first two tickets. The state legislature should allow the city to levy an escalating fine after the first two camera tickets: for example, $100 for the third ticket, $200 for the fourth, $400 for the fifth, and so forth, to reach the top level of $600, comparable with a police-issued ticket.

Revocation of registration. The state legislature should allow for the revocation of New York State vehicle registration after five red-light or speed tickets within 12 months, with warnings transmitted to the vehicle owner after the first ticket.

Revival and reform of the dangerous vehicle abatement program under state control. In 2021, New York’s city council enacted the “dangerous vehicle abatement program,” which allowed the city to force the registered owners of vehicles with more than five red-light camera or 15 speed camera violations within 12 months to take a safety course or have their vehicle subject to impoundment. (If someone other than the owner of the vehicle submitted an affidavit affirming that he or she was behind the wheel of the vehicle when the vehicle was ticketed, then that person could take the safety course instead.) The city considers the results of the program to be inconclusive, even though vehicle owners or drivers enrolled in the problem saw a bigger drop in ticket accumulation, compared with a control group (Figure 19). It plans to discontinue the pilot, citing the cost of administering the program of $1,000 per vehicle. DOT officials further claim that the process of impounding a vehicle was “complex and lengthy.”

Figure 19

DOT Analysis of Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program

	DVAP Course Participants (n=88)		Control Group (n=30)
	Before	After	Before	After
Total Speed Violations	3120	1333	969	574
Avg. speed violations per person	35.5	15.1	32.3	19.1
Total red-light violations	105	111	61	77
Avg. red-light violations per person	1.2	1.3	2	2.6

The state Department of Motor Vehicles, as the body responsible for regulating vehicles and drivers, should take responsibility for a revived program, reducing the threshold of tickets to five per year, and reviving and restructuring the program to pass the $1,000 cost to the owner of the vehicle. The state could consider working with the local sheriff’s office—which regularly impounds vehicles for nonpayment of tickets without incident—to impound the vehicles that are in violation of a revamped dangerous vehicle abatement act.

Explore market signals to deter dangerous driving. The state and city should explore how insurance companies could use ticket data to adjust their insurance rates. Although drivers accumulate driving records, it is vehicles that are insured. A vehicle that habitually accumulates red-light and speed camera tickets is an unsafe vehicle, regardless of the identity of its operator. That vehicle’s owner should suffer a financial penalty for failing to keep his property out of the hands of reckless drivers.

Education. The city should launch an outreach campaign to make parents and other relatives aware of the fact that the driver of a vehicle with a history of red-light and speed camera tickets is disproportionately likely to become involved in a fatal crash, including a crash that might kill that driver.

More aggressive enforcement of traffic laws, particularly more aggressive seizure of vehicles, is likely to draw several objections, some of which overlap with objections to red-light and speed cameras in general, and some of which overlap with objections to Broken Windows policing in general. This section briefly mentions and responds to such objections:

• Camera enforcement violates privacy. Cameras do not track vehicles on their paths from origin to destination; they snap a public violation of regulated behavior on a public thoroughfare at one point in time. The operator or owner of a registered, identified vehicle on a public road can have no expectation of privacy when in the process of violating the law.
• Escalating fines would harm the poor, particularly poor minorities. Escalating fines for infractions detected by an automated camera system targets behavior, not demographics. A vehicle owner in receipt of warnings of escalating fines can avoid such fines by changing his own behavior or the behavior of the individuals who drive his car.
• Impounding a vehicle whose owner might not be that vehicle’s reckless driver is unfair to the owner. The owner of property that can potentially maim or kill has a responsibility to keep that property out of the hands of reckless users.
• The loss of a vehicle could prevent a person from traveling to work, to school, to worship, or to care for family members. New York City is unique in the country in that the city has near-universal transit coverage, making the loss of a vehicle inconvenient, particularly for people living far from transit-saturated Manhattan or northern Brooklyn, but not catastrophic. Of course, anyone in danger of losing his vehicle to impoundment has the opportunity to avert that outcome by changing his or others’ driving behavior after earlier tickets accompanied by warnings.

Vehicles whose drivers accumulate five or more red-light and speed camera tickets a year are not New York’s “average drivers.” They are disproportionately likely to be involved in a fatal crash (to say nothing of serious injuries and general menacing behavior on the road). Subjecting such vehicles to heightened enforcement of traffic laws would make New York City’s roads substantially safer without harming the average driver, who gets fewer than one speed or red-light camera ticket per year.

An especial thank you to the Manhattan Institute’s Santiago Vidal for his expert data extraction and analysis for the 2022 control group. Thanks, as well, to Gavin Giuliani of the Manhattan Institute for data-validation work, to Cam Macdonald of the Government Justice Center for legal work involving the Freedom of Information Law request to the NYPD, to City Council Member Gale Brewer and former communications director Eddie Amador for their help in an earlier attempt to obtain the data, and to former city traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz for feedback on a draft.

Crash Number	Number of Vehicles Involved	Total Red-Light Violations (All Vehicles)	Total School-Zone Speed Violations (All Vehicles)	Total Violations
2	1	10	114	124
4	1	4	7	11
6	1	1	11	12
9	1	1	7	8
12	1	1	2	3
13	2	2	3	5
14	1	10	3	13
15	1	3	1	4
16	2	1	8	9
17	3	13	17	30
20	3	4	17	21
26	1	4	12	16
27	2	1	8	9
29	1		9	9
30	1		6	6
33	1		1	1
34	2	1	5	6
36	2	2	1	3
37	1		3	3
38	1		1	1
40	1		4	4
42	1		1	1
43	2		22	22
44	1		11	11
46	1		17	17
49	1		1	1
50	1		1	1
51	1		1	1
52	1		1	1
53	1	1	21	22
54	1		1	1
55	1	1	1	2
56	1	1	8	9
57	2	2	5	7
60	1	1		1
61	1	2	8	10
62	2	1	16	17
63	1	1	2	3
64	2	1	14	15
69	1	2	3	5
71	2	2	4	6
74	1	1	4	5
76	2	1	7	8
77	1	2	3	5
78	1	1	11	12
80	1		1	1
81	1	1	1	2
82	1	1		1
83	1		1	1
84	2	1	8	9
86	1	3	8	11
87	1		21	21
88	1	1		1
89	1	2	1	3
91	2	3	17	20
92	1	1	6	7
94	1	1	1	2
96	1		2	2
97	1		2	2
98	1	1	2	3
99	1	1	16	17
101	1		1	1
105	1	2	8	10
106	1	1	1	2
107	2	2	5	7
108	3	5	5	10
110	1		5	5
111	1		2	2
113	1	2	17	19
114	1		3	3
115	1	2	1	3
116	2	1	11	12
119	1	1	12	13
120	1		14	14
121	1	7	14	21
122	1		2	2
123	1	1	5	6
125	1		1	1
127	1	3	7	10
130	1	1	1	2
132	1	3	1	4
133	1	3	7	10
135	1		8	8
136	1	1	3	4
137	1		5	5
138	1		4	4
139	1		4	4
140	1	1	1	2
141	2	3	1	4
Total	111	133	639	772

Please see Endnotes in PDF

Photo by John Smith/VIEWpress