If the cops don’t nab you for speeding, the cameras will.
The city’s 140 speed cameras captured 1.4 million drivers racing through school zones in 2016, a 36 percent rise from the 1 million tickets issued in 2015, Department of Transportation records show.
In 2014, when the city had only 20 law-enforcing lenses, the city issued just 445,000 of the $50 tickets.
Cops also have been setting records in speed enforcement, doling out 137,260 speeding tickets last year, NYPD records show. That’s a 65 percent increase from the 83,202 tickets police wrote in 2013, the year before the city launched its traffic-calming Vision Zero plan.
A Department of Transportation spokesman said enforcing the speed limit is a top city priority because “drivers who speed are less likely to be able to avoid crashes, and crashes they cause are more likely to be fatal.”
But motorist advocates criticized the location of some of the cameras, including those set up at the end of highway exits.
“Off ramps are too short and they don’t give drivers enough distance to slow down from highway speeds,” said AAA Northeast spokesman Robert Sinclair. “But we fully support those that are in school zones.”
Police also issued 42,385 tickets to drivers for not yielding the right of way to pedestrians last year — a 185 percent increase from the 14,888 they wrote in 2013, records show.
The city had 229 traffic fatalities in 2016, the fewest ever recorded, down slightly from 234 fatalities in 2015 and a 23 percent decline since Vision Zero began. But pedestrian deaths rose to 144 last year from 139 in 2015 and cyclist deaths increased from 14 to 18 over the same period.
Last year cops wrote a total 1,042,703 moving violation summonses, including offenses for disobeying traffic signs, not wearing a seat belt, and using a cell phone while driving.
Delinquent drivers have poured more than $100 million into city coffers thanks to the mayor’s traffic crackdown.
The city collected $59.2 million from speed cameras, $25.9 million from red light cameras, and $23.8 million in moving violation fines in FY 2016, according to records analyzed by the city comptroller’s office.
The city began installing the cameras near schools in 2013 and started ticketing motorists in 2014 once the state legislature granted permission to expand the program.
Speeding violations issued by cameras from 2014 to 2016:
Speeding tickets written by police from 2013 to 2016
Source: Department of Transportation and NYPD
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