As you may recall, shortly after I moved to DC and before I had a chance to get my District license plates, I was slapped with two hefty speeding violations within two weeks while driving along the same stretch of road in NE Washington. Each were for $100. I immediately paid the first fine but when I received the second, I decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find whether out of state drivers are hit with more speeding tickets than DC drivers. I had to file two FIOA requests (over the span of six months) with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) before finally getting the data I sought. And lo and behold, it confirms my hunch: out of state drivers receive the lion’s share of speeding tickets, at least when driving along the 1400 block of Bladensburg Road in Northeast Washington. According to the data the DMV sent me, only 21 percent of all the cars ticketed in the month of September last year on that stretch of Bladensburg Road had DC plates. Now that doesn’t necessarily prove that the District is targeting out of state drivers, although it sure looks that way. According to a communications officer with the Metropolitan Police Department, which used to decide who should get fined, the DC Department of Transportation now makes the call on who to prosecute for speeding after draft tickets are prepared by the automated traffic enforcement system that captures cars speeding past the District’s automated video devices.
In one month, out of 1247 cars issued speeding violations by the DDOT along that one block of Bladensburg Road, the DMV data shows that 78 percent were from out of state, and an astonishing 42 percent came from the state of Maryland alone. This makes sense in one respect, since the stretch of Bladensburg Road that I requested data for is very close to Maryland’s border and many of the cars ticketed probably contain drivers commuting to and from DC for work or other activities. As mentioned before, only 21 percent were issued to drivers with DC license plates and another 18 percent to Virginia drivers. The rest of the tickets were issued to drivers from a wide swath of states sprinkled throughout the U.S. One could argue that local drivers know about the automated video devices and routinely slow down (so as not to trigger the ridiculously low 30 mile speed limit along that two-lane stretch of road), but one could also argue that Maryland drivers who regularly commute in and out of DC are aware of the speed trap as well. And yet they still get a disproportionate share of speeding tickets.
If every car that zoomed past a video device automatically received a speeding ticket, I would be far more likely to conclude that there is no bias here. But given that the DC Department of Transportation decides who actually gets a speeding violation in the mail, it certainly looks like out-of-state drivers are being targeted. There’s no question about one thing: the automated video devices are a very lucrative source of income for the District!
