The New York City Comptroller’s Office recently conducted an audit of the city’s speed camera program and pointed out that the NYC Department of Transportation doesn’t have full access to the database of speed camera images and videos. The lack of access is a critical problem because Verra, the contractor responsible for the cameras, can throw out speeding incidents before they even reach the NYC DOT. The contract that the NYC DOT signed with Verra prevents the agency from getting full reign of the archive. Streetsblog NYC reported that over 40 percent of incidents were rejected.
Oversight is pretty important in ensuring that the speed camera program isn’t being abused by Verra or the NYC DOT. Auditors discovered that a camera in Queens captured 702 speeding events over December 2022, but only 13 tickets were sent off. That’s a 98 percent rejection rate. Does the city know why the rate was so high? No! The system marked “No Vehicle Present” as the reason for most of the rejections, but Verra claims that was an error it made.
“No Vehicle Present” was the second-highest percentage reason for a Verra rejection across the entire program, only behind “EMS/Fire.” However, there were vehicles in the frame of samples reviewed by comptroller auditors. The rejections were likely made because the vehicles were in a different lane than stated by the camera system. One speeding vehicle had its case tossed because it was straddling lanes. It’s such a small irrelevant technicality to escape a speeding ticket.
These errors are obviously costly for New York City. The audit report stated:
“A review of Verra’s rejections found errors in 11.7% of the sample. This equates to a potential estimated loss of $865,500 over the sampled period, which only covered six weeks.”
Lost revenues are a small issue, considering that reducing speeding and other traffic incidents should be the main reason to install speed cameras. While the audit noted that incidents are down around cameras, they are up everywhere else. If NYC DOT had full access to the camera archive, it could actually determine which cameras can be relocated to trouble spots. The Comptroller’s Office has recommended both actions.
New York City is still planning on implementing a congestion pricing zone for a large swath of Manhattan that would also be monitored using cameras. Thankfully, it won’t be maintained by Verra.