Washington, D.C., is owed over $1 billion in traffic violation fees from more than 6 million unpaid tickets, according to a report.
According to a Washington Post review of city records, thousands of drivers have been repeatedly skipping out on paying the city for violating traffic laws. The tickets in most cases come from drivers who speed, park illegally or drive recklessly.
Drivers in D.C are expected to pay traffic fees within 30 days, or the fine will double. But many drivers choose to go through an online or in-person adjudication process that can result in the ticket getting thrown out.
Traffic fees are also waived after 15 years. If drivers have several unpaid tickers on their record, the District can void their registration or withhold renewing their license until they pay the fines.
Several administrative and logistic issues make it difficult for the city to collect its money consistently.
For example, most tickets are tied to the car, not the driver. Most traffic violations issued in the city are not given out by people but by machines. Because tickets from traffic cameras don’t result in points on a driver’s license, drivers are easily able to rack up thousands of dollars in unpaid fees but keep driving.
The 136 traffic cameras in D.C. issue thousands of tickets a year, but since the year 2000, more than 3 million tickets have gone unpaid, costing the city around $840 million, the report found.
If a car has two unpaid traffic violations older than 60 days, the car can be booted or towed away if it is found parked illegally. But that is only if it can be found, and if the towing and booting crews can get there fast enough, an issue exacerbated by understaffed crews and a prohibition against towing a car on private property.
A large majority of the drivers with the biggest outstanding traffic debt are from Maryland or Virginia, which would not be an issue if the city had a reciprocity agreement with those states. But because most of the violations are issued by traffic cameras, Virginia and Maryland authorities don’t hold their residents accountable for violations and debt racked up in D.C.
These issues in fee collection have led to thousands of serial violators. According to the report, more than 2,000 vehicles hold in excess of 40 tickets, and around 1,200 cars hold debt totaling around $20,000 each.
Mayor Muriel Bowser has implied that a commission will be formed sometime this year to tackle traffic-related issues and will offer recommendations to the city on how to improve fee collections.
Despite leaving a lot of money on the table, the District still collected more than $180 million in fines during the fiscal year 2022, the report stated.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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