Team Trump moves to ban traffic cameras in DC — as NYC’s set to quadruple the dangerous devices |
The Trump administration may soon reduce highway robbery by 95% in Washington, DC.
The Big Apple needs the same silver bullet because the city’s drivers could speedily be victimized by the biggest bureaucratic looting spree of the century.
Trump’s Transportation Department proposes to “prohibit the operation of automated traffic camera enforcement in the District of Columbia,” which would ban red-light, speed and stop-sign cameras.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) is attaching a similar provision to congressional transportation legislation.
The dispute over red-light and speed cameras goes to the heart of the question of how much harm politicians are entitled to inflict while they shake money out of citizens’ pockets.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser promised in 2014 to lower the traffic-fatality rate to zero within a decade.
Her Vision Zero program slashed speed limits and imposed a dizzying array of new traffic-enforcement cameras.
Bowser’s program was a smashing success: DC government revenue from traffic-camera fines rose almost ninefold, from $30 million in 2014 to nearly $270 million last year.
Regrettably, the number of traffic fatalities in DC doubled in the decade after Browser launched Vision Zero.
Red-light cameras spark traffic collisions because drivers stop suddenly to avoid being fined.
Six years after cameras were first installed in 1999, “the number of crashes at locations with cameras more than doubled,” with 400 additional collisions per year,........