Glendale leaders rallied this morning in front of Toll Middle School to support the passage of the California's latest speed limit bill. A.B. 645, authored by Assemblymember Laura Friedman, would enable a five-year speed camera pilot in six California cities: Glendale, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. Friedman spoke of the need to pass A.B. 645 "to stop the rising tide of deaths we are seeing on our streets."
Supporters included representatives from the city, the Glendale Police Department, the Glendale Unified School District, and community groups. Glendale Mayor Dan Brotman noted the role speeding plays in the severity of crashes, saying also that "speeding disproportionately kills lower income people, children and seniors." "These [traffic fatalities] are real people," Brotman emphasized, "husbands, wives, parents, friends, children, coworkers."
Glendale Chief of Police Manny Cid stressed the need to leverage camera technology "to improve traffic safety and to ultimately, save lives."
A.B. 645 was approved by the Assembly, and is current working its way through the state senate. It was recently passed in the Senate Transportation Committee and goes next to the Judiciary Committee tomorrow.
Friedman has been working to pass a state speed camera bill for four years. Responding to concerns raised by opponents of previous attempts, Friedman has tightly shaped the speed camera pilot to focus on reducing dangerous speeding, with provisions to foster equity and privacy.
This is not your parents' standard speed camera bill, but as Friedman stated, it allows for the creation of a sensible "model pilot" that could spread to other jurisdictions.
Specifically the A.B. 645 pilot speed camera program would:
- Speed cameras would be limited to areas with high numbers of injury/death, where street racing has already been a problem, and school zones. Cameras must be announced via "photo enforced" speed limit signage.
- Pilots would include an initial sixty-day warning ticket period. Tickets would only be issued when drivers exceed the speed limit by at least 11 mph, and the first speed violation for any vehicle would be a warning.
- Speeding enforcement would be more like parking enforcement in that speed camera violations would be linked to the license plate, not to individual drivers. The violations would not count as points against a driver's record. The driver would not be photographed.
- Any revenue raised would be spent on street safety improvements such as traffic calming.
- Where pilot speed cameras do nothing to reduce traffic speed, they would be removed.
A tearful Cindi Enamorado closed the event telling the story of her brother who, earlier this year, was "killed by a vehicle traveling over one hundred miles an hour" in a school zone. "We should have never gone through this. If this bill would have been in place years ago I'd still have my brother. This bill will, and can, save lives. And that's why I support it."
