DC’s traffic-safety policies have broken down. Here’s how.

On March 15, 2023, the three occupants of a Lyft were killed on Rock Creek Parkway when the driver of a Lexus SUV collided with the vehicle at high speed after fleeing a traffic stop. The driver had a long history of DUIs, and the vehicle was associated with over $12,000 in unpaid citations from traffic cameras in the District. The crash triggered a wave of reporting on DC’s inability to collect fines for traffic tickets or otherwise get drivers who pose a clear risk to others’ lives and welfare off its roads.

This tragic crash is sadly emblematic of the breakdown of traffic safety policy in DC.

Unpaid fines are the tip of the iceberg

Reporting on traffic safety in DC has focused substantially on unpaid fines from traffic cameras. This is because traffic cameras are now virtually the only method the District uses to intervene with reckless drivers and because the unpaid fines are easily viewable, meaning the public can check on the level of reckless driving tolerated by their elected and appointed officials.

It is indeed sobering to read that DC is owed over a billion dollars from drivers who break traffic laws and that there are no means by which to collect payment. Worse, however, is that the District has gradually surrendered its tools to get dangerous drivers off its roads. Plus, the inability to collect fines from drivers may limit the traffic-control benefits of automated traffic enforcement cameras.

In the nearly ten years since Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a Vision Zero mandate, and alongside a significant expansion of traffic cameras, the number of people who have been killed or seriously injured in a collision with a driver has steadily increased.

DC has limited tools to take risky drivers off the road

Most jurisdictions have policies generally consistent with the rich literature demonstrating that the number and magnitude of someone’s prior infractions are highly predictive of that person’s future crash risk: If you’ve racked up a lot of tickets, or committed a severe infraction, you are at risk of losing your license. But the District has instead a policy landscape that is unusually deferential to drivers and unresponsive to the risks some pose.

In 2022, the DC Council voted against a legislative amendment that would have continued to block driver’s license renewal for drivers owing money from fines associated with certain moving violations, ostensibly due to concerns about impacts on working class people. Traffic cameras now account for the vast majority of traffic tickets, but there is no way to assign demerit points based on infractions captured by a traffic camera. Demerit points could lead to interventions like a requirement for a dangerous driver to take education courses, or the suspension of their license.

Legislation introduced in 2022 would have corrected this, but it did not pass before the council period ended and, therefore, needs to be reintroduced. (The possibility that a driver who receives a ticket in the mail may not have been the driver whose infraction was caught on camera has been addressed in other jurisdictions. For example, vehicle operators in California and Queensland, Australia, who receive traffic camera tickets can identify the driver responsible and avoid penalties themselves.)

The breakdown in governance extends beyond what happens after a traffic camera captures someone engaged in an infraction. The driver of the Lexus involved in the Rock Creek Parkway crash had three prior DUI convictions, but it is unclear what, if any, consequences this had on her driving privileges. Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure Lucinda Babers initially claimed that the DC Superior Court did not transmit to the DMV the information on the Lexus driver’s DUI convictions. The court challenged this account, leading the DMV director to admit that it did, in fact, receive the information, but it was not processed due to a “technical miscommunication”; Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, expressed concern that this is “more than a glitch.”

In another jurisdiction, this driver may have been off the road long ago. In DC, there was limited intervention until a fatal crash, and now the driver is charged with three counts of second degree murder.

DC can boot cars, but current practices are inadequate

The only enforcement tool DC has left is booting vehicles with past-due tickets parked on public streets. Drivers in motion will not be stopped by the Metropolitan Police Department due to outstanding tickets, and vehicles on private property, including private parking lots, will not be booted. Deputy Mayor Babers has conceded that these constraints are widely known, making it relatively easy for one to successfully dodge the few consequences for dangerous driving.

And, the District government has no current intention to prioritize booting or towing vehicles with license tags associated with egregious fines or infractions. MPD cruisers fitted with license plate readers can identify vehicles on “hot lists” and flag their location, but vehicles with excessive fines appear not to be added to those lists. A better prioritization process is all the more urgent because such a small fraction of boot-eligible cars are actually booted: reporting from 2021 found that 633,000 vehicles are boot-eligible, yet DC boots only 50 per day.

DC should hold its own drivers accountable

In DC, traffic safety is complicated by the high number of people driving cars registered in other jurisdictions, especially Maryland and Virginia. An analysis from 2021 shows that there are more vehicles (over 500,000) from Maryland and Virginia with tickets in DC that are more than 60 days past due than there are DC-registered cars in total (less than 365,000).

Currently, Maryland and Virginia will not enforce payment by their drivers of fines linked to DC traffic cameras. Officially, the District has an “objective of ticket payment reciprocity for all ticket types,” and has claimed that both states have rebuffed reciprocity efforts. But Maryland and Virginia deny that DC has attempted negotiations at all—and, as Councilmember Christina Henderson has pointed out, it may not be reasonable to expect other states to enforce payment of fines from cameras in the District when the District doesn’t even do that for its own drivers.

The proliferation of counterfeit temporary license plates, which are used to evade traffic cameras and can facilitate vehicle theft, has further exacerbated the harm wrought by the District’s failure to enforce traffic infractions. Police forces in Maryland and Virginia are cracking down on fake tags, but efforts to even understand how fake tags work in the District have stalled.

Even if the District decides that the police should only be involved in traffic stops in the most exceptional of circumstances, it has not, on the whole, taken seriously the task of ensuring driver accountability, for example, by ensuring that they display valid tags. Recommendations by a temp-tag task force the city administrator convened in 2022 were not implemented, supposedly due to concerns of deepening racial inequalities.

DC leadership abuses the language of equity to excuse inaction

Lower-income and Black or African-American residents in DC, as in the United States as a whole, are at significantly higher risk of death and serious injury from traffic crashes. Data from the Metropolitan Police Department that I have analyzed reveal that Census block groups where less than 25% of the population is Black or African-American have seen a mean of 3.3 fatal or serious crashes since 2016, compared to 7.0 among those where more than 75% are Black or African-American. Almost all block groups with the highest number of crashes are more than 75% African-American, and residents in those block groups already face more environmental and health risks.

The way the District approaches traffic safety currently poses clear and disproportionate risks to its low-income and Black residents, who are most likely to be hit by a driver. But its decisionmakers have repeatedly invoked racial and economic “equity” as a reason to justify inaction and deference to drivers who have proven that they cannot be trusted to responsibly operate a vehicle.

Less sophisticated than this manipulation of the language of racial equity is a focus by DC’s leaders on extremely marginal facets of the road safety debate and on protecting the image of DC’s executive agencies. For example, in a roundtable on traffic safety held by Councilmember Allen on May 23, 2023, Deputy Mayor Babers characterized members of the public looking up publicly available data on tickets associated with particular license plates as a misuse of the District’s online ticket-payment system. (I testified at this roundtable as an expert witness.) Entering the tag number of the Lexus SUV in the Rock Creek Parkway crash allowed journalists to discover that the car was associated with $12,000 in unpaid fines, including several for exceeding the speed limit by more than 25 miles per hour. Doing this, according to Babers, is “problematic.”

In Ward 8, where people are most likely to be injured or killed by a driver, Councilmember Trayon White has a mixed record of supporting things that could reduce risks. Though he has advocated for speed bumps, White has opposed bike lanes and recently moved to defund safety improvements on Alabama Avenue and Wheeler Road, which nine of his twelve colleagues voted along with him to do. He also promised to forgive tickets from traffic cameras during his 2022 run for mayor, framing traffic tickets, but not the risk of being hit or killed by a driver, as a matter of racial and economic equity.

This is, unfortunately, the logical endpoint of a traffic-safety system that rests solely on monetary fines mailed to offenders, who can then pay them, or not, with no further consequence. Councilmember White, among others, views this current policy landscape as predatory and inequitable: traffic cameras are simply shaking down drivers—some of whom are poor—for money, and it is therefore sensible for them to reject cameras and tickets. But, if there is no way to collect fines, and no other consequences associated with the cameras, the drivers who pose the biggest risks are not likely to change their behavior to avoid being ticketed.

The way forward

In May 2023, I sent a letter to the DC Council; directors of the District Department of Transportation, Department of Motor Vehicles, and Department of Public Works; and Mayor Muriel Bowser co-signed by nine local organizations (GGWash was among them) and more than 650 members of the public, including survivors of traffic crashes, friends and families of victims, transportation planning professionals, and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners.

The letter makes the case for how the District’s inaction toward reforming its traffic safety policies is inequitable, and asks for urgent intervention from the legislative and executive branches, such as prioritizing the highest-risk vehicles for booting, reinstating enforcement mechanisms for traffic-camera infractions, abandoning efforts to reroute money from traffic cameras away from traffic safety improvements, and renewing efforts to achieve reciprocity with Maryland and Virginia.

All of us hope that this will be achieved before more people lose their lives to a driver known to pose an extreme risk to the life and safety of others.