Don’t be fooled — city officials looking to install 50 new speed cameras across Chicago neighborhoods are not motivated by your safety — they’re following orders from Mayor Brandon Johnson and many in City Council to generate more revenue to balance the city’s budget.
For as progressive as Johnson purports to be, this desperate budgeting tactic sure looks like the opposite.
Remember, it was our mayor who called speed cameras a “cash grab” on the campaign trail in 2023, back when he promised to phase them out. He even went so far as to call the cameras “regressive taxation.”
My, how things change.
We agree with Johnson circa 2023, when he was on the right track in his vision to end Chicago’s speed camera scheme. Now, he’s adding cameras left and right, and we don’t yet know where they’ll be, but we do know where some of the city’s most lucrative cameras are today. Seven of the existing speed cameras bring in well over $1 million each per year, and the majority of these cameras, which issue ticket after ticket after ticket, are on the South and West sides.
The case supporters make about speed cameras is that they improve safety, but even that isn’t a slam dunk. A 2022 University of Illinois Chicago report found some reductions in crashes but questioned the overall effectiveness in reducing serious injuries and fatalities, finding “little relationship between the number of tickets issued and the safety impact of cameras.” If the mayor is going to keep adding more cameras, officials should at the very least give us some legitimate proof that it’s improving safety.
Chicago already has 162 cameras today, but the rules allow officials to install at least 300 citywide. So while adding another 50 is within bounds, it also sets a worrisome precedent. If we add more now, officials are just going to keep coming back for more revenue later.
It’s important to examine how speed camera programs operate in other cities to see just how extreme Chicago has become. New York has more speed cameras than Chicago, but it issues dramatically fewer tickets per camera compared with Chicago, no doubt in large part due to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowering the threshold for speed camera tickets to 6 mph over the speed limit in 2021. New York, on the other hand, has kept its threshold to a more reasonable 10 mph over the speed limit.
And as if penalizing city drivers wasn’t enough, the city’s obsession with traffic cameras is becoming a contagion that’s infecting surrounding suburbs. From south suburban Homewood to northwest suburban Rolling Meadows, more towns are raising money from red-light cameras, plaguing drivers who are just trying to get to work, go to the grocery or drive their kids to a basketball game, among other everyday activities. It seems like only a matter of time before the suburbs follow Chicago’s lead on yet more speed cameras. The cash is too tempting.
Make no mistake: We support drivers keeping to the speed limit and being mindful of others who share our roadways. But these new cameras are not about safety — they’re about taking residents’ money, pure and simple. Chicago’s addiction to tickets from speed cameras borders on harassment.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.