The city’s new speed-detecting cameras may be the hardest working law enforcers in town — just 140 of them have handed out more than one million tickets for motorists racing through school zones in 2015, officials said.
The prolific cameras have more than doubled the 445,000 photo-based speeding tickets handed out in 2014, with a whopping 1,016,000 tickets issued to violators the past year.
And they were able to produced that huge haul of tickets — which cost violators $50 a pop — even though the last of the 140 cameras weren’t installed until September.
“We see a significant reduction in speeding wherever we put a camera in,” said city hall spokesman Wiley Norvell.
The city, started installing the first of its speed cameras in 2013, but only sent warnings to drivers’ homes.
The city got permission from the state to start ticketing on 20 of the cameras in 2014.
The city went back to the state legislature for permission to up the number, and now has 140 working speed lenses around the city.
Of those cameras, 100 are stationary lenses affixed above specific intersections near schools. Another 40 are mounted on SUVs that drive around school zones.
The cameras can only operate from one hour before the school day starts until one hour after it closes.
Though the tickets come with a $50 fine, they include no points against a driver’s license. If the drivers caught on camera all coughed up the money for their fine, that would means an additional $50.8 million into city coffers.
The city also has 150 red light cameras, which the city moved around earlier this year to throw off drivers who had been posting the locations on the internet.
In addition to the more than million speed camera tickets, the NYPD also issued drivers more than 130,000 handwritten speeding tickets and more than 38,000 failure to yield citations. Those tickets are more expensive and do weigh a driver’s license down with infraction points.
Drivers say they are angry about the cameras, which they say do not reflect the American way.
“I think they are awful and un-American,” said David Kafko, 29.
Others agreed.
“The issue isn’t about speeding,” said Sam Elliot, 37. “It’s about privacy and weather or not those images can be used for something else like Big Brother oppressions.”