100K expired traffic tickets take bite out of Seattle’s safety budget

Since 2021, nearly 100,000 automatic traffic tickets issued to drivers in school zones and at red lights were not reviewed by the Seattle Police Department in time and therefore expired without the city collecting the penalty.

That’s about 12% of all tickets received through traffic cameras in that time span. SPD blames staffing shortages for its inability to review each ticket.

The result is showing up this year in the mayor’s proposed budget. Combined with an overall decline in tickets, the money left on the table by failing to review every violation took a $4.3 million bite out of the city’s School Safety Traffic and Pedestrian Improvement Fund last year. Through 2027, revenue is projected to be $14.6 million less than originally estimated.

If approved by the City Council, the city would cut $2.4 million from the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Americans with Disabilities Act program to make up the lost dollars, delaying improvements this year on at least 117 curb ramps between street and sidewalk. The city is under a federal consent decree to bring its curb ramps into compliance with the ADA. Jamie Housen, spokesperson for Harrell, said the city will remain on target with the requirement.

An additional $500,000 would be cut from SDOT’s Neighborhood Greenways programs, part of the city’s bicycle master plan. Housen said this reduction will not result in delayed projects as the work will be shifted to the team in charge of pedestrian and bicyclist safety.

The Urbanist previously reported on the proposed reductions to the school safety fund.

Additionally, plans to double the number of school cameras from 35 to 70 — projected to cost $1.7 million — are being shelved as well. SDOT staff warned this summer that rolling out more cameras by the 2024 school year could be challenging considering SPD struggles to keep up with reviewing tickets from those already in place.

Automated traffic enforcement has found favor in Washington as police staffing remains depressed and concerns about deadly interactions during routine stops take hold. The Legislature recently expanded local authority to install cameras in and around school zones, hospitals, parks and deadly stretches of road, joining school zones, bus and HOV lanes, and signalized intersections as locations where they’re allowed. The Seattle City Council recently voted to install speed cameras in areas where drag racing is common.

But staff hours have recently proven a bottleneck in collecting on alleged violations. Issuing tickets via a camera — which run $237 in a school zone and $139 for a red-light violation — requires a law enforcement officer to review the incident, which means more staff hours.

King County recently decided against renewing an agreement to sign off on tickets collected from school buses for stop-paddle violations, citing staffing shortages.

SPD’s staff shortages have been well documented, explaining, in part, why Chief Adrian Diaz has already instructed officers not to pull drivers over for minor offenses. Traffic tickets issued by officers in general have plummeted from around 2,500 in August 2019 to around 300 this August.

Automated enforcement has picked up some of that slack. Since 2021, SPD has received around 840,000 tickets from traffic cameras. About 57% have resulted in fines being issued and 30% have been rejected for cause.

In 2022, the number of tickets that never received a review peaked at 16% or 63,000 for the year. So far this year, the number is way down — just 3% — largely because the overall number of tickets going out has fallen.

A drop in tickets may be a positive sign that drivers are reacting to automated enforcement. SDOT has warned repeatedly that it should not be seen as a stable stream of revenue.

But the drop is coming faster than even conservative estimates predicted. And the constraints on staffing raise questions about the city’s ability to expand camera enforcement as it hopes to do. City staff told the City Council in August that SPD likely needed five more people reviewing tickets to keep up with additional speed cameras.

“The consequences of SPD’s staffing crisis have impacts across the city in a wide variety of ways,” said Housen. “With the lowest number of officers since 1991, SPD’s historic staffing low means that emergency responses and patrol demand more resources from our already stretched thin police service.”

The City Council is set to deliberate Harrell’s proposed budget in the coming weeks.