New York's Speed Cameras Wrote $244 Million in Tickets. The City Says It Missed $108 Million More.

New York's school-zone speed cameras are the single most-ticketed thing in the city — more common than street-cleaning tickets, fire hydrant tickets, or failure-to-stop-at-a-red-light tickets.▸ In fiscal year 2025 they wrote 4,882,174 violations at $50 apiece, billing $244.1 million, according to the New York City Department of Finance's Local Law 6 report. A driver who gets one has almost no path out of it: statistically, the ticket is the fine. Meanwhile, the city's own comptroller says roughly a fifth of everything the cameras actually see never becomes a ticket at all — because the plate on the car is fake, expired, or taped over.

Once a speed-camera ticket is issued, New York collects almost all of it.▸ Of the $244.1 million billed in fiscal 2025, the city had collected $229.7 million — 94.1 cents of every dollar billed — by the time DOF closed the books on this report. Of what came in, 87.1% was the base $50 fine, 12.6% was late penalties, and a sliver — 0.3% — was interest, which only starts accruing once a violation enters judgment.

Compare that to what happens when a driver actually contests one.▸ Citywide in fiscal 2025, 1,584,222 parking and camera violations went to a hearing, and 419,192 of them — 26.46% — were dismissed on a not-guilty finding, per DOF's report. But that citywide average hides a sharp split between tickets an officer writes and tickets a camera writes. Calculated against DOF's own published counts of tickets issued and tickets dismissed, just 15,693 of the 4,882,174 school-zone speed tickets issued in FY25 — 0.32% — were dismissed after a hearing. Red-light camera tickets fared almost as poorly for drivers, at 0.30%. Compare that to a ticket a human officer actually writes by hand: 8.98% of muni-meter receipt violations were dismissed, and 1.42% of street-cleaning tickets were. A camera doesn't misjudge a parking spot or misread a curb; once it has a clear plate, the ticket essentially always sticks.

The humans on the other side of that hearing process are straining to keep up.▸ DOF's Adjudication Division processed about 2.1 million summonses in fiscal 2025, up roughly 4% from fiscal 2024, and the agency says it's struggling to recruit and retain administrative law judges "in a competitive legal market," per the Mayor's Management Report. The wait to be seen in person has ballooned as a result: from 1.3 minutes in fiscal 2021 to 11.2 minutes in fiscal 2025 — 8.6 times longer, even as the tickets those hearings are meant to contest are dismissed at a rate approaching zero.

The city's near-perfect collection rate only applies to tickets that get issued — and its own auditors say a meaningful share of violations never clear that bar.▸ In a January 2024 audit (Report FN22-095A) covering January 2019 through June 2023, the New York City Comptroller's office found that in the first half of 2023 alone, 1,076,182 camera-captured speeding incidents — 22% of everything the cameras recorded — were rejected before a ticket could even be issued: 748,468 because the plate was a "ghost" (fake, missing, or belonging to another vehicle) and 327,714 because it was physically obscured. Missing or temporary-plate rejections were up 5,356% over the audit period. The Comptroller's office put the resulting annual revenue loss at roughly $108 million for 2023 — money the city says it should have billed but structurally could not, because it never had a plate to bill. In response, the City Council raised the fine for an obscured plate from $65 to $250, but the audit's underlying finding stands: the system that collects 94 cents of every dollar it bills is, by the city's own account, blind to a comparable sum it never gets to bill in the first place.

That system is also getting more expensive to run.▸ New York's contract with its camera vendor, Verra Mobility (formerly American Traffic Solutions), expired at the end of December 2025. The new five-year deal, effective January 1, 2026, is worth $998 million — 34% more than the 2021–2025 contract it replaces, Verra Mobility announced — a figure the company also disclosed in its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings filing with the SEC, which credited the New York City Department of Transportation as the primary driver of growth in its Government Solutions segment. Part of what the city is paying for is scale: New York's red-light camera program, long capped by state law at 150 signalized intersections — under 1% of the city's intersections — is expanding to 600 under legislation Governor Kathy Hochul signed in 2025, per the Mayor's Office. Verra installed the first 300 of those cameras in the second half of 2025 alone, generating $38.4 million in installation and product revenue, per its SEC filing.

Fine, collection, dismissal, and hearing-wait figures are New York City Department of Finance and Mayor's Management Report data for fiscal year 2025 (July 2024–June 2025) unless otherwise noted. The $108 million evasion estimate and the 22% rejection rate are the Comptroller's office's own figures for calendar year 2023 and January–June 2023 respectively, the most recent periods with a published, citable estimate; the underlying enforcement gap is described by the city as ongoing.