There’s no question that some cities use parking tickets and speeding tickets as a form of revenue. Our nation’s capital has taken this practice to a whole new level.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Washington, D.C. on track to make $148 million from traffic tickets this year
Washington, D.C., is on track to rake in $148 million from traffic tickets in 2016, a Tuesday report from AAA concluded.
“Those drivers who were chanting ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ a couple of years ago are probably regretting their words now. The speed camera program is back with a vengeance,” John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s manager of public and government affairs said in a statement.
The District’s speed cameras have issued more citations in the first four and a half months of fiscal 2016 than in all of 2014, AAA learned through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Approximately 365,000 drivers were ticketed from Oct. 1, 2015 to February 2016. The city was able to bring in $37 million in revenue from increasing the efficiency of the automated system.
“They are just really activating every camera that they have in place,” Townsend told WTOP in a separate interview.
If the current pace continues, the city will hit 1.4 million speed camera tickets and generate nearly $150 million in revenue by the end of September, a record for the police department.
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When revenue from traffic tickets reaches that level, isn’t it essentially an unofficial tax?
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