Speed Camera Debate Shows Poor Neighborhoods Pay Too Much, Get Little

CHICAGO — Bless everyone who suffered through last week's long-winded, ward boss monologues as the City Council debated whether traffic speed cameras that levy $35 tickets to folks who cruise arterial streets from six to 10 mph over the limit were either a municipal cash grab or life-saving robots expected to generate about $80 million in fines this year.

Aldermen could have saved a lot of time by admitting both things are true.

Dangerous drivers are a problem. And City Hall can't afford to ticket fewer speeders.

As for the true effectiveness of speed cameras — and what more city planners should do to make streets safer and more transit-oriented — I'll leave it to the pedestrian and cycling advocates.

Regardless, it was no surprise aldermen sided with protecting the city budget — which would lose out on a sizable pot of fines — in the name of preventing fatal traffic accidents, which a lot of people are not convinced speed cameras accomplish.

Let's face it, sometimes speed cameras seem to be government-sanctioned pickpocketing.

For instance, the $35 speed-cam ticket that landed in my mailbox for the sin of going 7 mph over the limit on an empty four-lane street near a "park" under the Skyway definitely seemed to be a blatant cash grab.

The way I see it, I got caught in a City Hall video trap set on the East Side to troll Indiana drivers and punish Chicagoans who are on their way back from saving at least 60 cents-a-gallon on gas or 2-percent on sales taxes or buying cheap cigarettes and fireworks in the Hoosier State.

It's the Chicago Way. You can't convince me otherwise.

On the other hand, the $35 speed camera tickets I've gotten for breaking the limit on a stretch of the east 55th Street where people drive like maniacs curving through Washington Park might save a life or two.

The tickets changed my driving behavior. Now, I often remember City Hall's robotic fine distribution system allegedly is at work protecting lives there and act accordingly, by driving up to 5 mph over the limit to avoid fines.

But the only thing worse than having to pay robot speeding tickets is listening to ward bosses talk about why city government relies on fining speeders — a hefty amount in poor, minority communities hit the hardest by skyrocketing inflation — to balance the budget.

After a majority of City Council members voted, as expected, in favor of keeping the speed camera revenue stream flowing, the proposal's sponsor, Ald. Anthony Beale still has a point.

"Nobody wants fatalities. Nobody. We all want safety in our communities. But, at the same time, this is affecting the Black and Brown community more than anything else. … The money is staggering on how it’s affecting our community," he said during Wednesday's meeting.

Black and Latino people living in poverty-stricken neighborhoods that have been redlined by the banks, neglected by generations of powerful politicians, are hit the hardest by fees and fines.

A $35 fine amounts to more than 2 hours of minimum wage work.

At $15-an-hour, it'll take almost an entire day to make enough cash to afford a $95 city sticker for the vehicle people living in transit deserts need to get to where the jobs are.

All the hot wind wasted at Wednesday's City Council meeting was a reminder that, even during hard economic times, that our heartless city doesn't offer a discount for folks living on the edge in forgotten neighborhoods — the transit deserts, food deserts and medical district deserts.

Last week's City Council speed camera debate was a reminder that Chicago remains a tale of two cities — one for the rich and powerful and another for the poor and forgotten.

Something needs to be done about how people living in parts of town where the median household income is less than a minimum wage full-time salary (before taxes) pay the same fees for city stickers, business licenses and building permits — and the fines that go with them — as folks living in River North, for instance, where the median income was more than $128,000 in 2020.

If Chicago needs speed camera robots to protect the citizenry, so be it.

But it makes little sense that people living in our city's poorest ZIP codes continue to pay Lincoln Park prices to drive cars, fix-up their homes and open businesses in neighborhoods pocked with vacant apartment buildings, strip malls and corner stores.

They pay the same fees and fines, but navigate streets where potholes don't get fixed as expeditiously as the rich part of town, CTA trains don't run, bike lanes are scarce, tourists don't visit, developers don't want to build and big corporations — Target and Whole Foods, for instance — move out after a few years of raking in tax breaks.

Chicago's working class families, what's left of them, aren't getting their money's worth.

What to do about it? Well, that's a City Council debate worth having during an election year.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots.

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