Federal transportation officials are advancing a proposal that would effectively wipe out Washington’s automated traffic enforcement system, and with it a major stream of city revenue. If the plan is finalized, the loss of camera tickets would leave a budget gap measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, forcing District leaders to confront the cost of a federal decision they have spent weeks trying to stop.
What is framed in Washington as a debate over fairness and safety is, for the District, also a stark fiscal reckoning. The U.S. Department of Transportation is moving to bar the city from using traffic cameras on federally aided roads, a change that would unravel a program that generated $267.3 million in a single year and blow a hole in the city’s financial plan that local officials say they never volunteered to create.
The federal push to shut off DC’s cameras
I see the core of this fight in the quiet but consequential move by the Department of Transportation to send a proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget that would prohibit Washington from operating its automated traffic enforcement program on key corridors. The plan targets cameras on roads that receive federal funding, which in the District includes heavily traveled arteries such as New York Avenue NE near Bladensburg Road NE, where FILE images of red light cameras have long symbolized the city’s aggressive enforcement strategy. By tying the restriction to federal aid, the proposal uses the leverage of national dollars to dictate how the city can police its own streets.
Federal officials have framed the effort as a response to what they describe as excessive fines and an overreliance on automated tickets. The draft language would sharply limit or eliminate the use of speed and red light cameras, and it would do so not through a local vote but through conditions on transportation funding that Washington depends on for basic infrastructure. That structure is why District leaders argue the proposal is not a neutral safety tweak but a direct intervention in local governance, one that would abruptly shut down a system that has been in place in some form since the first red light cameras went up in 1999 and has since grown to a network of 546 devices currently spread across the city.
A safety tool or a federal overreach?
From my vantage point, the most striking tension is between how local and federal officials describe the same cameras. Mayor Muriel Bowser has called the devices “a critical part” of the city’s traffic safety efforts, arguing that they slow drivers on dangerous corridors and protect pedestrians in neighborhoods that have long endured speeding and cut-through traffic. Advocates for the existing system point to corridors like New York Avenue NE, where high speeds and heavy truck traffic have made enforcement a priority, and they warn that removing cameras would endanger people in the community who have come to rely on automated enforcement as a backstop when police cannot be everywhere at once…