The black box blinked once. Twice. Attached to a light pole on South Ashland Avenue, the newly-minted speed camera flashed a total of eight times in about 30 seconds one August afternoon, cars zooming by after cruising off I-55 a few blocks north.

Drivers ticketed for speeding there on June 1 — the first day the camera went online — have so far paid the city more than $60,000, in increments of $35 and $100.

It’s a drop in the municipal bucket for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s citywide camera expansion meant to help him balance this year’s budget.

But if early returns are any indication, speeding tickets from the new cameras are quickly hurtling toward the $11.4 million benchmark Johnson counted on for 2025. As the first batch of new cameras went live in June, the city issued more tickets than it has in any other month in nearly three years, a Tribune analysis showed.

The Ashland camera, in Ald. Nicole Lee’s 11th Ward, is one of more than 50 new speed cameras set to activate throughout Chicago in 2025. The influx is one of the largest installation waves since the city began using the devices to catch speeders in 2013.

Lee, who voted against Johnson’s 2025 spending plan that relies on the new cameras, fell silent when told about the day-one barrage of paid tickets from the Ashland camera, before offering a terse assessment of the early return: “Wow.”

The cameras’ expensive start for speeders is a substantial step toward and potentially beyond revenue projections, but the noteworthy early returns are likely to decline as drivers figure out where the cameras are busting them and slow down.

While aldermen and transportation officials celebrate the cameras as a safety tool, resident reactions are more mixed.

To some, the added spots for ticketing are a cash grab, which critics — among them Johnson himself as a mayoral candidate — have derided as a regressive form of taxation because they hit poor and working-class drivers the hardest. To others, they are one useful tool for improving traffic safety.

The Tribune analyzed data from 22 of the new cameras between June 1 and June 23 and found drivers paid more than $1.7 million in speeding tickets in just those first three weeks, a sure undercount that does not include unpaid tickets. Forty new cameras are now issuing tickets.

In the short time period for which paid ticket data is available for the new cameras, they collected a daily average of about $5,000 in fines per device, far more than the around $900 that cameras already in place averaged in the same time frame.

And a separate data pool detailing the total number of tickets issued shows that from June to mid-July, the new cameras issued over four times as many tickets as the old cameras, with new devices leading the way as the city’s top ticketers.

The output is eye-catching, and it signals that people are speeding, Lee said.

“Those are really striking numbers,” she said. “I think the cameras were probably put in exactly where they needed to be.”

But that ticketing will likely slow down as drivers adjust to the newly placed cameras, according to Chicago Department of Transportation spokesperson Erica Schroeder. CDOT typically sees “an initial adjustment period followed by a steady decline in violations,” she wrote in a statement. It is too early to draw conclusions about the new cameras, she added.

Speeding fines sharply spiked after former Mayor Lori Lightfoot successfully pushed for the ticketing threshold to be lowered from 10 mph to 6 mph in order to balance the 2021 budget. But ticketing revenue has fallen ever since, Department of Finance data shows.

Chicago’s speed cameras, first turned on by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013, assessed daily fines of almost $250,000 in 2021. By 2024, that sum had dropped to $160,000 in paid tickets.

In December, Johnson pitched 50 new cameras as a way to pay for Chicago Police Department positions tied to a federal consent decree that he had put on the chopping block in his 2025 budget proposal until aldermen and others complained. The City Council acquiesced to the cameras, many members describing them as a much-needed safety tool that they hoped to place in their own wards.

It was a change of position for Johnson, who previously criticized speed cameras as “regressive taxation.” During a debate when he was running for mayor in March 2023, he said he aimed to phase them out if legally permitted to do so.

CDOT looked at crash history and aldermanic input to place the new cameras, which are required by state law to be within an eighth of a mile from a school or park, Schroeder wrote.

The department placed its second most active new camera outside Edgewater’s Broadway Armory Park. In its first three weeks, the camera issued over $18,000 in paid fines each day.

Edgewater resident Joe Shadday said he thinks constant construction on nearby streets has “forced” drivers onto the road and in front of the camera, “adding onto the pile” of ways the city makes money off residents.

“None of us are big fans of them,” Shadday said. “Because they’re not slowing down traffic, and all they’re doing is charging local residents a bunch of money for being one or two above the speed limit.”

But Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, 48th, said she has seen cars slow on Broadway. She welcomed the new camera to her North Side ward, describing it as a tool needed, alongside street design changessuch as bump-outs, to make the city safer.

The wide street she described as “made for speed” is being used as a cut-through, she agreed. That’s an issue for a local economy that would be better served if people “actually stop, look around, shop, get out of their cars,” she said.

And it’s a dire threat to pedestrians who can be seriously injured or killed by speeding drivers, she argued. She cited a car running over a 90-year-old man in a December hit-and-run as he crossed the street near the Edgewater Library a block north and the need to protect elementary school students.

“People need to be dissuaded to go fast,” Manaa-Hoppenworth said. “Our community deserves safe streets. Pay attention to the rules of the road, and we will all get along.”

Standing on Sheridan Road, Barbara Mears said she was hit by a car crossing that street about a year and a half ago, not far from the new camera. The 79-year-old, who has glaucoma and limited vision, said she hasn’t really noticed a difference in car speed.

“I never feel safe, actually,” Mears said. “Especially since the accident.”

Because many cars use Sheridan Road to access the north suburbs, they might not respond to the cameras as much, Mears guessed.

Lee said cars are slowing near the South Ashland Avenue camera. She sees traffic calming near another new camera placed on a stretch of South Archer Avenue in her ward that’s “like a highway,” she said. That camera pulled in over $10,000 per day in its first three weeks, the fourth most among the new ones.

She recalled jumping from her car to help after seeing a car hit a man using the crosswalk around two years ago. She gets complaints about drag racing on the strip too, she said.

Adding speed cameras is not a “silver bullet” or a “make-or-break” solution to address Chicago’s structural budget issues, Lee said. In fact, she hopes the cameras make less and less money by getting drivers to slow down.

“The cameras are doing what they are supposed to do … they shouldn’t be generating high levels of revenue the entire time,” she said. “If you don’t want to give the city your money then there’s ways for you to do that: By obeying the traffic laws.”

Speed cameras cut Chicago car crash injuries by 12% from 2017 to 2019, according to a CDOT-commissioned, independent University of Illinois Chicago study. But external factors and “environmental cues” can shape road speeds too, said UIC professor Kate Lowe, who studies transit funding and policy.

Wide roads and vacant lots can signal motorists to drive faster, while easy-to-spot shops, pedestrian-friendly infrastructure such as better crosswalk signage and even Divvy bike stations can subtly prompt drivers to slow, Lowe said. At the end of the day, she added, the city needs to “radically transform” its roadways to better serve Chicagoans who aren’t driving.

The city has spent millions to add bike lanes and raise crosswalks and bump-outs in recent years in an effort to calm traffic. And it is testing a new tool to prevent illegal parking in bus and bike lanes: the “Smart Streets” program that ramps up ticketing by using automated cameras mounted on buses to issue fines.

City officials estimated the Smart Streets program being tested downtown would bring in $5 million last year, a goal missed when the program launched later than anticipated in November. The pilot would need to bring in four times as much money from July to December as it did in the first half of the year to hit the $5 million mark, according to data obtained by the Tribune.

Speeds at the city’s cameras have decreased by about 2 mph in the last year, according to CDOT. Meanwhile, Chicago saw a 27% reduction in traffic fatalities after a 2021 peak, according to the department.

They could have been further driven down by a push from Ald. Daniel La Spata, who wanted the maximum speed limit on city roads to be lowered to 25 mph, a decrease he argued would make crashes both less common and less fatal. La Spata’s push failed in a 28-to-21 February vote after some, including many Black aldermen, voiced equity concerns about ticketing costs.

On the ground, however, the speed cameras don’t always have as clear an impact.

Bridgeport resident and ride-share driver Lunfu Liang often sees drivers slow down right next to the Ashland camera, then speed up again once they pass 35th Street, he said.

“My sense of safety is a little higher with them,” he said in Mandarin, pulling back his young daughter from wriggling toward the playground at Kucinski-Murphy Park, less than a two-minute walk from the Ashland camera.

But overall, Liang said, the new cameras haven’t been much of a nuisance. It’s just about following the speed limit, he added.

“If you’re careful, there’s no problem,” he said. “For regular people, there’s not much to it.”

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/07/mayor-brandon-johnson-new-speed-cameras-big-early-revenue/