One road funds Tacoma’s entire traffic cam contract. Is it a trap? | Opinion
Drivers in Tacoma risk tickets from 14 automated enforcement cameras, and soon there will be more. They’re positioned at traffic lights, school zones and one road where people tend to speed. It’s that last one that seems to be built different.
The lone speed camera, on East Bay Street where it meets River Road on the border with Puyallup, brings in ticket revenues that more than cover the annual fees owed to the outside contractor that provides the system. Between 2019 and 2024, the revenues have always exceeded, and sometimes doubled, the funds brought in by all the other cameras combined.
In 2024, the camera brought in over $2 million.
I’m on the record as supporting automated enforcement cameras. It seems clear that they change people’s behavior while limiting the need for traffic stops. And in Washington, laws keep the ticket prices painful but still reasonable. Funds get re-invested into a special fund for traffic safety measures.
But it still caught my attention that this one camera had consistently brought in revenues roughly between $1.7 and $2.2 million per year for the past five years.
It raised the question: does this road need something else to help people slow down? And is this simply a road that lulls drivers into speeding, and then sends them a ticket in the mail? I could see an argument that that’s underhanded, and perhaps not really intended to change people’s behavior.
I asked the city and a road design expert, and the answer surprised me. Yes, the road could be encouraging people to speed. But it has unique uses that would make it a bad idea to use other traffic-calming measures like narrower lanes or shoulders, or a median.
In short, those measures “are not feasible or could create safety or operational concerns,” city spokesperson Maria Lee said in a statement.
Does this camera make sense?
Tacoma’s automated camera enforcement system is growing, and I think that’s a good thing. I say that as someone who got a ticket from a camera-enforced school zone. Still, I was suspicious of the speed camera on East Bay Street.
A 2024 state law is allowing cities to expand these systems to more locations. As a result, Tacoma recently upped the limit on tickets from automated enforcement cameras from $124 to $145 and added hospitals and park zones to the list of places that can have speed cameras. The city will also be able to add more than 20 speed cameras outside of those zones. Currently, the camera on East Bay Street is the only speed camera outside of a special zone.
Fee revenues cover the cost of the program in Tacoma, and the rest of the money must be re-invested into traffic enforcement and safety infrastructure.
Yes, a private company also profits from this arrangement. NovoaGlobal (formerly Sensys) has received between about $640,000 and $770,000 from Tacoma each year between 2019 and 2024 to operate the cameras. But cities and counties contract many services to the private sector. That’s not inherently bad if it’s done carefully.
Some of the money also goes to fund City of Tacoma departments involved in running the program, including Tacoma’s municipal court, as well as the Tacoma Police Department and Public Works Departments. This all passes the smell test.
But something seemed off to me about one camera bringing in such a huge portion of the revenues. I talked to a road design expert, University of Michigan civil and environmental engineering professor Peter Savolainen, for a gut check.
“Generally speaking, drivers adjust their speeds to a level they’re comfortable with,” Savolainen said.
Historically, road designers have set speed limits based on the speed that the 85th percentile of drivers go on a given roadway. But things have changed. When traffic fatalities surged in 2020, largely due to speed, the focus shifted to reducing crashes, injury and death.
Now road design techniques focus on lowering the speed that people feel comfortable driving at, Savolainen said.
“I won’t say we want to make drivers uncomfortable,” he said, “but we want to try to get them to reduce their speeds to something that’s appropriate for the contextual environment.”
This typically translates to more constricted roadways. Think medians, narrower lanes, smaller shoulders, and curb extensions for pedestrian crossings.
But when I mentioned semi-truck traffic on East Bay Street, which connects industrial areas near the Port of Tacoma with River Road, a rural highway, Savolainen said he saw an issue that probably prevented those measures from being workable.
Semi-trucks need room to maneuver safely. The City of Tacoma confirmed that this was an important part of the road’s design, in addition to emergency response vehicle access. Add to that list: “the roadway’s constrained geometry, adjacency to the Puyallup River, railroad infrastructure, and the Puyallup Tribe’s cemetery.”
I buy it, grudgingly. There’s always the opportunity to add more and better speed-limit signage, and I would be happier if fewer people were speeding as a result of the camera. I don’t know how the math pencils out when it comes to the ratio of people fined to the total number of vehicles on the road in a given year. But I’d prefer to see that the camera was raking in steadily smaller amounts of money each year as people slowed down. That’s not happening at all.
I’m left with one conclusion. If you hate this speed camera, there’s currently only one way to get back at the city for putting it there.
Don’t speed.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect that there are currently 14 automated traffic enforcement cameras in Tacoma.
