While campaigning, Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson took a firm stance on speed cameras. He called them “inequitable, regressive taxation.” He used the words “cash grab” and “not proven effective in making our streets any safer.” But according to IllinoisPolicy.org, the mayor’s budget fell $11.4 million short, and he’s resorting to the same cash grab he promised to end.

By last year, Chicago drivers were hit with one speed camera ticket every 20 seconds. Then, during June, Johnson rolled out 22 more cameras across the city. Chicago hit a three-year ticket high during July. Its cameras issued 8,457 tickets a day—one every 10.2 seconds.

‘Inequitable’ taxation indeed

Johnson’s busiest cameras are on Chicago’s poor Southeast Side. That neighborhood’s 11 cameras have been working overtime, handing out an average of 19,521 tickets each during July. That’s 650 a day from each camera. In one month alone, the neighborhood was saddled with 214,731 tickets.

Meanwhile, the biggest spike in tickets issued per camera was in the Southwest Side. Each camera issued an average of 42% more tickets than the same time last year. Driving behaviors aren’t changing.

Last year, Illinois Policy reported that $35.2 million of ticket revenue came from drivers going just 6–10 mph over the limit. A third of those drivers couldn’t pay on time. The first late fee more than doubles the cost of a Chicago ticket.

A decade-long study found collisions in Chicago fell 27% between 2012 and 2022. But in the area directly around the speed cameras, they only dropped 2%. A study from Great Britain concluded that drivers learn where speed cameras are, and their presence does little to change driving habits—even on other stretches of the same road.

Who will rein in Chicago’s speed cameras?

As speed cameras became available, many state lawmakers saw them as an opportunity for small towns with overburdened police departments to enforce the law. So state legislatures voted to allow departments to install them. Now, many state governments are rethinking this approach.

When Virginia’s legislature debated laws limiting speed camera ticketing, one lawmaker called them a “policing for profit scheme.” It doesn’t help that private companies often lease speed cameras to towns while pocketing the majority of the ticket cash.

After Chicago’s latest mayor campaigned on an anti-speed-camera platform, then installed even more of them, many residents might feel hopeless. But Illinois’s state legislature could always revisit its speed camera policies to rein in Mayor Johnson’s “inequitable” taxation.