New York City has hit its state-imposed maximum of 600 intersections with red-light cameras, beating Mayor Mamdani’s promise of reaching the benchmark by the end of the year. Few policies can be so directly tied to saving lives and it’s an outrage that the city needs the approval of the state Legislature for this program and that the cameras at all 600 intersections expire on Dec. 1, 2027.
Every time that City Hall wants to improve street safety, the mayor has to go hat in hand to Albany to ask pretty please to save lives and slow down traffic. That is how the cameras were expanded from a maximum of 150 intersections with red-light cameras, though it remains a relative drop in the bucket in a city that has close to 14,000 intersections with traffic lights.
Not every single one needs to have a red-light camera, but probably more than 4%. It doesn’t take much digging to see that many of our most damaging crashes begin with a car blowing through a red light.
This is no longer an experiment. Red-light running at intersections with cameras has fallen by 80%. And that’s with a small fine of just $50. Why not have escalating penalties for repeat offenders that are commensurate with the danger of unsafely operating a multi-ton piece of machinery that can, in a split second, kill and maim them and others around them? The answer, again, is the Legislature, whose members, from Buffalo to Brooklyn, want to micro-manage the city.
There are the same foolish restrictions from Albany on speed cameras in school zones. Those roughly 2,200 cameras vanish on July 1, 2030 without action from the bosses in the Capitol. Absurd.
On the matter of safer streets, the City Council should revisit its Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program, which expired years ago after a relatively short stint in effect and only 12 vehicles seized despite thousands of eligible drivers. We should tighten it up from its previous version, lowering the number of speeding or red light tickets necessary to seize the vehicle of a repeat offender. There are similar proposals in the Legislature, and if one body does not act, the other should. Driving is not an inalienable right but a privilege, one that can be lost when there is serious misbehavior.
Some opponents of red-light and speeding cameras will cry that these are expansions of the surveillance state at a time when that issue is at the fore, but there are some key distinctions between this and something like Flock. For one, these cameras are only recording when someone is actually breaking the law and only used for the purposes of automatically sending them a ticket; they are not pervasively and persistently recording comings and goings and they are not creating searchable databases of our movements.
The city must make sure that this distinction remains to maintain public support for red light cameras as a crucial tool in combating the danger that reckless drivers pose to all of us.
Mamdani wants to bring more order and safety to the streets; if only the Legislature would let him. The mayor is accountable to 8 million New Yorkers, he should not have to answer to 213 legislators in Albany.