Roc City Wants Public Feedback On Automated Traffic Enforcement

Is Rochester finally ready to smile for the cameras?

The city’s first foray into automated speed and red-light enforcement a decade ago didn’t go well, but as Kodak City residents confront their rising crash fatality rates and the continued failure of the local police force to hold drivers accountable, cameras are getting another look.

Speed, red-light and school bus stop-arm cameras are a proven safety measure (even if a certain “Real World” alumnus in Washington disagrees), and now Rochester is asking residents — via an online survey and five upcoming public meetings — to consider them as part of the city’s imperative to reduce crash deaths and injuries via Vision Zero.

The case for cameras is particularly strong in a city where dangerous driving has become commonplace — and the consequences of it profound. the city has a serious traffic safety problem. The city’s Vision Zero report found that Rochester had the highest rate of fatal crashes among mid-size upstate New York cities — and is far less safe than New York City, where cameras have been reining in the most reckless drivers for more than a decade.

In 2024, for example, INSERT NUMBER HERE Rochesterans were killed and INSERT NUMBER HERE people were injured by car drivers.

Reconnect Rochester Co-Executive Director Cody Donahue said Rochester residents routinely report near misses involving drivers running red lights. And many drivers and pedestrians wait a couple of beats after getting a green light simply to make sure an approaching driver isn’t going to blow through the intersection.

“Red-light running has become the norm,” Donahue said.

Cameras could be rendered unnecessary if residents felt that the Rochester Police Department was holding drivers accountable. But the hard work of conducting traffic enforcement by humans is on the decline in Rochester for several reasons, not the least of which is that the headcount of the Rochester PD is roughly 100 officers short (out of a current force of 611) of its pre-COVID staffing. In addition, fewer officers are assigned to traffic enforcement, Donahue said. And, like many cities, Rochester has a long and painful history of controversial police stops, which has made some police agencies reluctant to stop drivers.

As a result of all of this, drivers don’t see much consequence for dangerous behavior. Automated enforcement could fill that gap, but there’s a long process before Rochester gets there.

After collating the feedback from the public meetings and online survey responses, the city will decide its direction by the end of the year, Gruber said.

If the city wants to move ahead, it will need help from Albany in the form of a home-rule message seeking state authorization to implement an automated enforcement program.

That could put state Sen. Jeremy Cooney, chair of the Senate Transportation Committee and a Rochester-area lawmaker, in the put-up-or-shut-up position.

Cooney has reportedly been supportive of automated enforcement, but the road to successfully holding drivers accountable in Albany is filled with potholes big enough to swallow the SUV of even the most committed lawmaker.

Donahue hopes Rochester can seek Albany’s authorization during the next legislative session, pointing out that New York City has more than a decade of success with automated enforcement and that the state legislature should stop treating the technology as an experimental concept.

The ghost of Lovely Warren

Hovering over Rochester’s debate over speed cameras is the failure of the original pilot program, which was ended in 2016 by then-Mayor Lovely Warren, a Democrat, after drivers predictably revolted that the cameras were a “cash grab” that supposedly targeted marginalized communities (though it is very easy to avoid getting an automated ticket, simply by not driving recklessly). And there were some technological shortcomings, too: The city ended up nullifying hundreds of tickets after red-light cameras dinged drivers traveling through the tail end of slightly shorter yellow lights.

Jump forward a decade and now “data privacy” is the buzzword for camera opponents, never mind that enforcement camera data is not public. Speed enforcement cameras, for example, are not like license plate readers that contractors like Flock Safety have allegedly misused. And there is no evidence, despite public misperception, that the New York City Department of Transportation or its police force are using speed camera pictures to help federal agencies conduct immigration enforcement.

Plus, the automated enforcement technology is much better than it was 10 years ago, safety advocates say. Plus, any vendor selected by Rochester would be subject to strict guardrails governing data sharing and use, Donahue said.