Chicago mailed 1,843,398 speed camera tickets in 2024, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation’s annual report on automated enforcement, which uses ticket data from the city’s Department of Finance. Spread across a leap year, that works out to one ticket roughly every 17 seconds, around the clock.
The figure making the rounds this fall is slower: one ticket every 48 seconds. It comes from a September 16 analysis by Illinois Policy, a free-market think tank. Policy analyst Lilly Rossi counted 529,529 tickets at $35 and 123,786 at $100 in 2025, or 653,315 in all, and put speed camera revenue at $64.2 million, up from $59.6 million in 2024. The group attributes its numbers to the Department of Finance…