Automated Enforcement: Philly Checks out Washington DC’s Program

On Wednesday, June 15th, the Philadelphia Parking Authority organized a site visit to the District of Columbia Department of Transportation (DDOT) to learn more about their automated enforcement program.  The Bicycle Coalition and Transit Forward Philadelphia joined the trip, along with Councilman Mark Squilla, a City Council staffer, staff from the Streets Department, Office of Transportation, Infrastructure & Sustainability, and AFSCME Local 33 .  We were graciously hosted by Charles A. Turner, Program Manager of DDOT’s Automated Traffic Enforcement (ATE) program and his team.

DDOT has an impressive program that is over twenty years old.  DDOT enforces:

1. Posted Speed Limits (Speed)
2. Stop Sign (Failure to come to a complete STOP)
3. Red-Light (Running Red-Light)

They operate 38 red light cameras (since 2000), 92 speed cameras (since 2002) and 8 stop sign cameras (since 2013).  In 2023, they plan to roll out upgraded equipment and new technologies for their current programs, and launch new enforcement programs for bus lanes, bike lanes, oversize trucks and school-bus arms.

We also learned the following about DDOT’s ATE program:

• the ATE group works with Metropolitan Police to assessment crash sites
• the ATE group owns and operates mobile speed enforcement units
• citizens can request “traffic safety inputs” through 311 requests.
• ATE operates a public facing portal that tracks all traffic safety requests that is searchable
• ATE owns the data collected by vendors
• 819,000 citations have been issued since October 2022.
• An analysis published in the 24th IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC 2021) reported that as a result of the program, all crash types were reduced by 9%, property damage only crashes were reduced by 13% and injury crashes were reduced by 30%.

After an in depth presentation from Charles and his staff, we visited a speed enforcement site (at top of page) and a stop sign enforcement site (below).