CHICAGO — The city of Chicago has framed its school speed camera program as a way to keep kids safe, pushing back against claims it’s a cash grab by pointing to a simple rule: Drivers don’t get tickets on days students aren’t in class.
One day last fall, that standard broke down.
On a Friday in November when a Southwest Side charter school was closed to give students a chance to get vaccinated against COVID-19, nearly two dozen cars nonetheless got hit for speeding in the nearby automated camera “school safety zone.”
Eight of those drivers near Acero’s Major Hector P. Garcia M.D. High School got tickets Nov. 12 for exceeding a camera-enforced 20 mph speed limit, intended to apply on school days when children are present.
Another 15 were ticketed by one of two cameras assigned to the school on West 47th Street in Archer Heights for going over a 30 mph limit that’s in place when kids aren’t nearby.
The Tribune received data through an open records request about all speed camera tickets near schools on “vaccine awareness day,” when Chicago Public Schools and other schools shut down to promote the idea students should get vaccinated.
After a reporter informed the Chicago Department of Transportation cars were ticketed passing Major Hector Garcia when the campus was closed, the city said it would cancel outstanding citations and offer refunds to those who already paid.
City workers are assigned to verify speed camera photos before tickets are sent out, according to CDOT spokesman Michael Claffey. They track school schedules, and aren’t supposed to approve tickets from any of the 79 cameras outside 33 public, private and charter schools across the city when they’re closed.
On Nov. 12, Acero’s decision to shutter Major Hector Garcia slipped by those monitors, Claffey said.
“This was an unusual circumstance with Acero,” he said, noting both city and state laws allow for school speed camera enforcement on school days only.
But Mark Wallace, executive director of the local anti-camera group Citizens to Abolish Red Light Cameras, said the situation at Major Hector Garcia seems all too familiar given the city’s past stance on the cameras.
“Their M.O. all along has been, ‘We’ll issue the tickets, and if nobody says anything, we’ll get away with it,’ ” Wallace said. “It’s always been that they’re responsive to correcting it when they get found out. They’ll defend the program right up until somebody hands them the proof there’s a problem.”
John Kronenberger got a $35 ticket in the mail in January, informing him he’d been caught by a speed camera driving over the 30 mph limit near Major Hector Garcia on Nov. 12.
“Usually it’s very trafficky there, and I know those cameras are there because they’re forever flashing,” said Kronenberger, who owns a nearby rehearsal facility. “So I usually am going very slow there. I’m surprised when you said that it was 36 (mph).”
But he said he wasn’t surprised to learn he was ticketed mistakenly.
“It’s Chicago. They’re broke, and the cameras, realistically, are just a way for the city to make money,” he said.
If the goal is to protect kids from speeding cars before and after school, there’s no need on 47th Street, Kronenberger added.
“If you go there during school, and there are pedestrians around there, and it’s time for school to start or end, it’s impossible to do 5 miles an hour there. It’s so congested,” he said. “There’s no school parking lot. It’s an industrial area, and a residential area on the other side of the street. So it’s total chaos.”
Kronenberger had already paid the ticket by the time he found out the city was canceling it, and the city cashed his check, he said. Kronenberger said he would try to get a refund, but on Wednesday, he said he had not yet received it.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot inherited about 160 automated speed cameras near Chicago schools and parks from her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.
But as part of her 2021 budget, Lightfoot lowered the threshold at which the cameras snap pictures of license plates and the city issues tickets, from 10 mph over the limit to 6. The number of tickets — and the revenue to the city if drivers paid the fines — skyrocketed in the months after her new rules took effect.
Lightfoot has defended the change, saying she enacted it to keep pedestrians, cyclists and motorists safe.
She and allies on the City Council have so far beaten back an attempt by Far South Side Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, to go back to the old speed camera benchmarks.
For Wallace, the Major Hector Garcia tickets highlight why so many Chicago drivers are angry at the city about the ticket system. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll do our best to follow the rules we set.’ But they want to hold the public to the absolute letter of the law: Six mph over and they’ll ticket you every time.”
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