Rebecca Goldfield hadn’t received a moving violation in more than 50 years of driving. Then, at an unassuming intersection in Northwest Washington, her spotless record received its first black mark: She got a $100 photo ticket for going a few inches over the line, she says, at a stop sign at 37th Street and Whitehaven Parkway NW.
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Images of her vehicle at the intersection show her brakes lights were on, said Goldfield, a retired documentary filmmaker. The fine for what she deemed a non-offense was unreasonable, but contesting the ticket seemed pointless.
Goldfield said she “resented it heartily.”
“I think it’s just a way for the city to cash in on people not in 1,000-percent compliance and don’t even know that they’re not,” she said. “I’m all for safe driving ... but the rules have got to be clear.”
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This stop sign, it turns out, has proved lucrative for the District. Public records obtained by The Washington Post show a traffic camera posted there generated more than $1.3 million in the past two years.
The camera — loathed by some residents who say it is overly sensitive though praised by others who say it promotes safe driving — is one of more than 130 traffic cameras that officials expect to generate around $100 million this fiscal year. Ninety of those cameras are speed cameras, 38 are at traffic lights and only eight are at stop signs, according to May data from the District Department of Transportation.
The sentinel posted at 37th Street and Whitehaven provided evidence for more than 17,000 photo tickets since March 2020, according to a D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles response to a public-information request from The Post. Though more than 1,600 tickets were contested by those who received them, more than 1,400 were deemed “liable dispositions” that those ticketed must pay.
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The total amount paid: $1,361,596, the records response said. It was not immediately clear how this compared with the District’s other stop-sign cameras.
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In a statement, the District Department of Transportation said that nationally 20 percent of fatal crashes occur at intersections.
The statement cited a 2011 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that showed a 24 percent decrease in fatal crashes in 14 cities with a red-light camera program. A follow-up study showed 78 percent of D.C. drivers favored such cameras.
The statement also said revenue from traffic cameras go into the city’s general fund — not to companies that provide the cameras, as some of those ticketed believe.
“Crashes are easily preventable if the driver stops completely as required by law,” the statement said. “Drivers should come to a complete stop prior to the stop bar at an intersection controlled by a stop sign or traffic signal. The stop sign units use radar to detect if a vehicle stopped at, rolled through, or ran a stop sign. Tickets will be issued when vehicles fail to stop at a stop sign.”
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Residents of Glover Park, the upscale Northwest neighborhood that’s home to the camera, offered mixed opinions of its usefulness and purpose.
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Some defended the camera in a residential neighborhood where children walk to school. Southbound 37th Street is a two-lane road that carries some commuter traffic, including Metrobuses and delivery trucks.
Sharat Ganapati, who lives in Glover Park and often pushes his son in a stroller around the neighborhood, said the camera is welcome when “half the neighborhood walks.” Though commuters often blow through stop signs elsewhere, they cannot break the social contract at 37th and Whitehaven without suffering the consequences.
“It’s nice to see some place for once where people have to actually obey the law,” he said.
An economics professor at Georgetown University, Ganapati said pedestrian injuries and fatalities are “externalities” — that is, a side effect or consequence — of unsafe driving. Our society has accepted these costs, he said — but with this stop sign camera, the District has charged for the externality in the hope of eliminating it.
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In other words, Ganapati said, there’s nothing wrong with a stop-sign camera designed to generate revenue as long as it reduces violations and doesn’t disproportionately impact poor people.
“D.C. likes money. D.C. decided to solve this problem but also get some money out of it,” Ganapati said. “It’s just the way D.C. does things.”
Jackie Blumenthal, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, said initial fury about the camera — which has ticketed her and her husband — has faded to resignation.
“When the camera first started generating fines, the sentiment ... was decidedly angry,” she wrote in an email. “But there was a lot of back and forth about safety and stop-sign scofflaws, and the complaining gradually went away.” She added: “The camera’s settings may be unforgiving, but as I said, it’s a small price to pay for reminding people that stop means stop.”
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D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who represents Glover Park, said she’d tried to address concerns about the camera by urging the city to change signage. Drivers could be confused by a “photo enforced” sign near the intersection that could refer to the speed limit or the stop sign, she said.
But however drivers are alerted to the camera, according to Cheh, the fines it generates are too large.
“Any time you have high amounts of fines accruing from a particular camera, you have to assume that there’s something wrong or at least you have to take a good look," she said.
Paul Wittrock said he’d lived in Glover Park for more than 30 years, an avid cyclist for much of that time. While not opposed to any traffic camera per se, he thought fines could be income-adjusted to make them more equitable.
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Also, the camera could be more forgiving, Wittrock said. When manual transmissions were more common, authorities overlooked the rolling “California stop.” Why punish it today when rolling stops would save fuel, helping mitigate climate change?
“How many people literally come to a complete stop where your car is 100 percent stationary?” he said. “Virtually nobody. If they set it at a threshold to represent generally law-abiding behavior, it would be more acceptable.”
Luz Lazo contributed to this report.