Virginia and Maryland say they won’t allow ticket reciprocity for automated ticket enforcement.

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If you drive a car around D.C., perhaps this won’t come as a surprise to you: The District of Columbia fines its residents at higher rates than any other city in the country, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census data from Quartz. The city collects $261 in fines per resident, which is more than double the next-highest city.

Every five years, cities report their revenues and expenditures to the U.S. Census, including taxes and a section called “fines and forfeitures.” Quartz culled the reported information from 2017—the last year with available data—in this particular section, and ranked cities in order of how much fine revenue they brought in per resident. The District blew other comparably-sized cities out of the water (Quartz only compared it with other cities of more than 200,000 people).

New York, Chicago, Boston, and New Orleans took the next-highest spots, and none of them came even close to the self-reported number in D.C.

New York and Chicago both reported $118 in fine revenue per resident, New Orleans $114, and Boston $113. Not every large city reported its 2017 revenues, including Austin and Detroit, but per Quartz these cities have generally reported low revenues from fines and forfeitures in the past.

“Fines and forfeitures” come from things like parking and speeding tickets, though in D.C. you can also be fined for a variety of other infractions, including eating or drinking on the Metro or jumping your fare (though the city hasn’t been enforcing that rule recently). The city itself actually reported even higher fine-revenue number in its own budget (this can differ from census numbers due to different ways of categorizing information, according to Quartz).

There has long been some controversy around the amount of money D.C. brings in through its speed cameras. In 2018, the city issued $104.5 million in citations via speed camera. Two years ago Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh suggested the cameras were creating “speed traps.”

“In some instances, cameras exist in areas where the speed limit may not be apparent or are arguably too low, or where road conditions, such as the grade, induce an acceleration and signage is not adequate to caution drivers to slow down,” Cheh wrote in a letter to the District Department of Transportation that year.

In an audit in 2014, the D.C. Auditor found that drivers were getting tickets for violations they didn’t commit and for vehicles they didn’t possess, per the Washington Post. The cameras apparently weren’t precise in pinning down which vehicle passing by was actually speeding, the outlet reports.

There have also been problems with fiscal dependence on fines to fund the budget: in 2015, malfunctioning speed cameras created a $40 million drop in revenue that the city had to scramble to fill the gap.

The mayor’s office has not responded to a request for comment.

But the District is planning to slowly shrink the amount of revenue it brings in via fines, according to Quartz, which reports that the city is planning to bring in $148 million in fines in the year 2023.

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