SF Speed Cameras Are Issuing Tons of Tickets — and Slowing Drivers, SFMTA Says

It’s been four months since San Francisco drivers began receiving a new kind of mail from the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency: speeding tickets, issued by cameras.

Those notices, the agency said, are already having a drastic impact on driver behavior.

“In that time, we have seen a major decrease in speeding throughout San Francisco,” SFMTA communications director Parisa Safarzadeh wrote via email.

This spring, the department set up automated speed cameras at 33 locations throughout San Francisco’s High Injury Network — the 12% of streets across the city that account for more than two-thirds of traffic-related severe injuries or fatalities. According to Safarzadeh, an SFMTA study tracking speeds along 15 of the corridors where the cameras have been installed found an average 72% reduction in speeding, based on data captured before and after the cameras went into effect.

The results come as San Francisco looks to reimagine its strategy for curbing traffic deaths after the expiration of its lofty Vision Zero policy in 2024. Despite the campaign, that year the city saw the highest number of traffic fatalities in more than a decade.

Marta Lindsey, the communications director for advocacy group Walk SF, said that the new cameras can be a powerful tool to promote street safety.

“Speed cameras are doing exactly what we hoped they would in changing driver behavior,” Lindsey said. “On Fulton Street… there’s a camera now, and you can tell drivers are going slower and they are paying attention and it’s different.”

The first of its kind in the state, San Francisco’s speed camera program had a bit of a rocky start after a slow and halting rollout this spring.

But by June, the cameras were up and running. After a 60-day grace period, when the city sent warnings to drivers traveling more than 11 mph above marked speed limits on camera-monitored roads, it started issuing tickets for $50 and up, depending on the driver’s speed.

Throughout the summer months, SFMTA recorded 260,142 warnings and citations sent to drivers. The actual number of speeding events on those roads during the warning period was higher, Safarzadeh said, but the agency had limited staff resources to manually review the incidents, and its software underwent an update that made the screening process more conservative.

Since July, the agency said it’s issued fewer violations week over week. So far, two-thirds of the vehicles that have received a violation haven’t received a second.

The average vehicle speed across the 15 major streets SFMTA studied also declined by an average of 4 mph, and all now have averages below posted speed limits.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 645 in 2023, approving the pilot camera program in multiple cities across the state. San Francisco is only able to have 33 camera systems under the legislation, which caps the number of authorized systems by population size, but Lindsey said there are still a number of roads on the city’s “high-injury network” that could benefit from speed monitoring.

She said the camera data also points to just how pervasive — and extreme — speeding in the city is.

“The data is this combination of things for me where I’m like, ‘This is fantastic, this is working,’ and this problem is as big or maybe even worse than we thought it was,” she told KQED.

More than 51,700 of the drivers who have been cited since June were traveling at least 16 miles above posted speed limits — which means they were exceeding 40 mph at 28 of the intersections.

“If someone is hit by a driver going 40 miles an hour, [there’s a] 75% or higher chance that they’re extremely severely injured or they’re dead,” Lindsey said.

According to the SFMTA study, the average speed for issued violations has dropped each month since all of the cameras went into effect. Lindsey is hopeful that this trend will continue, and the cameras’ positive results will inspire local and state leaders to allow more cameras in the pilot cities and beyond.

Still, she believes even the current system can slow drivers around the city, not just where they’re being watched.

“There’s kind of this halo effect that often happens in cities with speed cameras where drivers are slowing down beyond just where the camera is,” Lindsey said. “I think it can become a virtuous cycle with driver behavior, being like, ‘OK, we have to go slower in San Francisco. Everybody’s going slower.’”