Speed cameras have sprung up in school zones across Florida, including this one in Broward County.
Joel Rose/NPR
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Joel Rose/NPR
MIAMI — If you’ve driven in Florida recently, you may have seen the speed cameras springing up in school zones across the state.
Carlos Acosta wishes he hadn’t.
“I think it’s a money grab,” Acosta said. “That’s what irks me the most. It’s all about making money.”
Millions of drivers across the country are encountering automated speed cameras for the first time, or they will soon. Safety advocates say there’s clear evidence that these cameras work to make roads safer. But there’s also a growing backlash from drivers in Florida and beyond.
Drivers like Acosta, who worked in the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office for 27 years before retiring. This spring, Acosta says he got two speed camera tickets in school zones near his house in a suburb of Miami.
“I’m all for protecting the kids coming and going from school,” Acosta said.
But he says both of his tickets were issued during the middle of the day, when those kids were inside the school. “So they’re basically giving you a citation for going over the regular speed limit,” he said. “That’s where you get popped.”
Florida recently joined the growing list of states where speed cameras are allowed. So have California, Hawaii, Michigan and Minnesota. They’re now legal in more than two dozen states, with each taking a different approach in terms of where the cameras are located, and where the money goes.
In general, safety advocates say these cameras are working, and saving lives by forcing drivers to slow down.
“The whole point of the cameras is reducing the speeds, which leads to crashes at lower speeds when they happen, so there’s fewer people dying,” said Raul Avelar, an engineer with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research organization funded by the auto insurance industry.
Avelar points to multiple studies in the U.S. that show cameras can cut speeding by 70% or more. One study in Maryland found speed cameras reduced the likelihood of serious injury by 39%.
But some drivers are pushing back. Ted Hollander is a lawyer at The Ticket Clinic, a law firm that is tracking the locations of speed cameras in Florida, and fighting the tickets in court.
“We don’t really think it’s truly about safety, because if it was, it would only be during the times when the kids are around, not when they are in school,” Hollander said. “We feel like it’s an illegal tax and we want to do what we can to protect people.”
Critics of speed cameras may have found an ally in the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation.
Last month, the Federal Highway Administration quietly stripped speed cameras from a list of “Proven Safety Countermeasures,” as they’re known, that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives, along with bike lanes and other speed-related measures.
The FHWA said the changes to its website are part of a broader review of safety recommendations to ensure they align with the Trump administration’s priorities, though safety advocates argue the DOT is undermining strategies already proven to work.
Speed camera backers also dispute that these programs are intended to raise revenues.
“We have so many safeguards built into this to make sure it is purely a traffic calming and speed reduction effort and not a money grab, not a surveillance tool,” said Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Calif., who represents part of the Los Angeles area.
Before joining Congress, as a member of the state assembly, Friedman wrote California’s speed camera law. Any money raised from the speed camera program there has to be invested in safety improvements to the streets where the tickets were issued, Friedman said.
The first speed cameras in the state came online last year in San Francisco, followed by Oakland earlier this year.
But the big test of California’s law is looming over the next few months, when speed cameras are set to be activated in Los Angeles — a city that has long been defined by its love of cars, especially fast ones.
Still, Friedman says many of her constituents welcome the cameras.
“When people come forward and they say, ‘I’ve been scared to cross the street in this area, or we have had street racing constantly all night long,’ seeing them have a chance now to do something about it” has been satisfying, she said. “It is going to make it harder for people to speed, and that’s a good thing.”
