The D.C. Council held a six-hour public oversight hearing this week to decide the best way to address the District’s dangerous driving crisis.

Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) hosted the event because previous efforts to hold dangerous drivers with “demonstrated patterns of excessive speeding, stop sign running, and other dangerous behaviors” accountable have not been successful.

The issue was highlighted by the arrest this week of Nakita Walker, 43, who police say was speeding at 100 mph when she hit another car in Rock Creek Park in March, killing three people. Walker has had at least five DUI convictions since 2009 – and in a single 10-month period, her vehicle had $12,000 worth of speed camera tickets.

“She had clearly over and over and over the course of many years shown a track record for using that [driver’s] license in a way that put the public at risk of serious injury or death without any real evidence that her behavior changed,” Allen said. “Until we find ways to change that motorist behavior, traffic deaths are going to persist.”

He said D.C. does a good job identifying drivers with many tickets but has struggled to hold them accountable. The roundtable consisted of academic and traffic safety experts breaking down the problem and solutions.

“(It) highlighted some very clear ways that our enforcement around dangerous driving is not getting the job done,” Allen said, wrapping the hearing. “And we need to think through what are our strategies to make those changes.”

D.C.’s Vision Zero efforts to eliminate traffic deaths have been largely unsuccessful, with traffic deaths climbing more years than falling since its 2015 launch. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports 6.2 million traffic tickets totaling nearly $1.3 billion have not been paid. 

In the roundtable, Allen addressed tackling issues like:

• How to improve the District’s Automated Traffic Enforcement system to ensure meaningful consequences for moving violations.
• Exploring updates to D.C.’s legal definition of reckless driving and the consequences
• How to address inter-state drivers and get reciprocity enforcement for camera tickets among D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.
• If the District should assess points to drivers for camera ticket citations, which could lead to license suspension.
• If in-person traffic enforcement be moved from MPD to another District agency.
• How to create an equitable enforcement system that works.

Allen heard from nearly a dozen traffic safety experts that pitched everything from blocks-long speed camera corridors to using data to target the worst road offenders. Allen noticed several overlapping issues: a lack of coordination among enforcement agencies, a lack of strategy, and a lack of urgency. He promised new legislation out of the roundtable.

Here are five things we learned during the hearing.

Rock Creek Park crash emblematic of larger issues

The March 15 crash that killed Lyft driver Mohamed Kamara, 42, and passengers Olvin Torres Velasquez, 23, and Jonathan Cabrera Mendez, 23, was likely preventable. Walker sped off from a traffic stop and hit Kamara’s vehicle going nearly 80 mph. With thousands of dollars in outstanding fines, the vehicle was eligible to be booted and could have had her license held under prior circumstances.

D.C. previously suspended driver’s licenses for unpaid tickets, but revoked the practice in recent years. Now, among the few consequences, is not being able to get or renew certain business licenses.

“I’m having a hard time understanding why a driver’s license is going to be treated so differently (than a business license),” Allen said.

Several experts pointed out a recurring theme of knowing who the bad actors are, but not having an effective way to keep them off the road.

Balancing equity and accountability

Witnesses including Priya Sarathy Jones of Fines and Fees Justice Center, Ariel Levinson-Waldman of Tzedek DC argue there needs to be a balance between equity and accountability. 

Both have previously advocated for alternative means of fines, like day fines that fluctuate with income, rather than flat $100 fines that can be devastating to the city’s low-income residents. Others suggested fines based on vehicle value or lower fines for people on food stamps. Vehicles are a lifeline to work, healthcare, and basic necessities, they say.

Scarlet Neath, Policy Director for the Center for Policing Equity says it’s a tough cycle: the city doesn’t invest in road design in low-income areas – they’re often wider, with faster speed limits, making them more dangerous. Then ATE cameras are put on those roads to make them safer, but they capture more low-income drivers who can’t afford to pay. 

But Councilmember Christina Henderson noted “driving the speed limit is free.”

Ryan Calder an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Policy at Virginia Tech had several proposals including calling for license suspension or driver re-education after a certain number of tickets, a prioritized list of vehicles with numerous tickets that should be found and booted, and accountability for expired plates.

Nadeau is proposing a bill that would focus on giving points on your license instead of fines, which would allow D.C. to suspend licenses after a certain number of violations.

“Enforcement can’t be rooted on who can pay,” she said.

The Council won’t wait for a task force to be done in 2024

The Mayor’s office is beginning a year-long look at improving automated traffic enforcement.

While Allen hopes the council and the mayoral committee can work together, he says the council can’t wait that long to get started. He says he’ll bring legislation sooner than the task force can report back.

“I think you can hear from our questions… a bit of impatience,” Allen told Deputy Mayor Lucinda Babers, who is heading the committee. “We want to be able to move and will be moving much faster than I think the task force is currently.

“That said, I’m not looking for us to find ways to get sideways. I’d love for us to find ways that we’re partnering together to figure out how we move more quickly.”

Could D.C. use speed camera safety zones?

D.C.’s current speed cameras act as an island. Cameras are on just 1% of all D.C. blocks. And the way it works now is that drivers slow down by the speed camera and then speed back up after it. 

“I would be concerned about a system where we have speed cameras that don’t actually modulate the behavior of drivers,” Calder said.

John Leibowitz, who owns Passage Safety, says it’s more of a speed trap model than one that is changing behavior. He says behavioral economics offers new ways to think about fines and incentive structures. His model calls for “safety zones” of smaller sensors to monitor blocks-long stretches in dangerous areas. 

The smaller, cheaper sensors would send out real-time notifications of “nudge” fines.

“Smaller, more regular nudge fines or points might replace large once-in-a-blue-moon fines,” he said. “Real-time notifications instead of waiting weeks for a paper mailing could help people know that they’re there infracting and then encourage them to slow down. 

“The idea is to build safer driving habits and norms through more constant behavioral reinforcement.”

Still too many loopholes

Fake and expired temporary license plates continue to plague D.C. streets. People often use them to get around accountability for bad driving — racking up tickets and tolls without the consequence of ever paying fines. The only way these drivers get caught is if they leave their cars on a public street and happen to get booted.

https://twitter.com/JWPascale/status/1661734473707454465

D.C. police say they’ve arrested 1,200 people for fake tags over the past two years, but more continue to pop up.  Councilmembers encouraged MPD and D.C.’s attorney general to investigate the tags’ sources and prosecute people creating fake license plates. Nadeau says it’s a safety issue with “profoundly little scrutiny.”

Another loophole is that Maryland and Virginia drivers, who make up the majority of unpaid tickets in D.C., aren’t barred from re-registering their vehicles or renewing their licenses.

Both states will put a hold on an account if they have unpaid tickets from a police stop, but they won’t do so for camera tickets.

Both states have been resistant to reciprocity, saying it would gum up their DMV systems, Babers said. D.C. issues three times the number of tickets as the nearby jurisdictions.

Use data and targeted enforcement to get known problematic vehicles and drivers off the streets

Jeff McEnery’s body was decimated in a crash – so much so that a doctor, speaking at Councilmember Allen’s roundtable, compared it to getting hit by an IED. 

A driver of a giant GMC Yukon XL SUV smashed into four cars and his motorcycle from behind, after failing to stop at a red light. McEnery survived the incident after a long rehab period, but that same driver had killed two people driving 90 mph in a school zone just two years prior.

“This man committed a horrific act of traffic violence and was not taken off the road,” she said. “His license was not suspended. Information about his case was not shared between jurisdictions, whether in D.C. or Virginia, or Maryland. 

“In fact, on the day that this man nearly killed my husband, he was due in PG County for his arraignment. He missed his court appearance for a deadly act of traffic violence because he was busy committing a nearly identical act 20 miles away.”

It’s these kinds of stories that frustrate District residents and council members alike. 

Calder, the VT professor, says the number and severity of speeding tickets can predict future crashes. Therefore, D.C. should make a more concerted effort to root out vehicles and create a “priority list” for booting and towing. 

Councilmembers noted that the District’s seven booting crews roam the city and boot a car whether they have two tickets or two hundred tickets.

“DPW parking enforcement needs to prioritize,” Nadeau says. 

Babers pointed to a recent incident where DPW tried to find one egregious vehicle and it took them a day and a half of hunting. She says most egregious offenders are non-D.C. residents and not always in the city.

Nadeau says booting should be geographic or find some easier way to find people.

Babers noted they are getting more boot crews and more license plate readers on city vehicles, which will help identify more vehicles to create a “scofflaw list.”

Deputy Mayor Babers doesn’t like people using the DMV ticket search to look for scofflaws

For years, people in the District, especially Twitter users, have taken advantage of the D.C. DMV’s ticket lookup tool. While it’s meant to be a system to pay for your outstanding tickets, people use it to look up drivers that have put them in danger: vehicles that run red lights, speed around stopped vehicles at a stop sign, or almost hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Users have found vehicles with hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars of tickets.

But former DMV head and current Deputy Mayor Lucinda Babers doesn’t like that people do that, calling it “problematic.”

“I want to make sure that people understand that just because they see a vehicle and then they use our DMV’s online system, which is in no way a system that should be utilized to try to figure out how many tickets are on a car,” she said. “People are utilizing that system inappropriately.”

Allen was incredulous about that line of thought and questioned if the database was inaccurate. Babers said it might not show all of the tickets or show if a ticket is in adjudication (the system does note if a ticket is in adjudication by marking that ticket in red font).

“Unless you’re telling me you’ve got massive wholesale problems here, (what you’re describing) is on the margins,” Allen said. “When a vehicle has 20, 30, 40, high-speed violations… that’s a dangerous driver.”

Twitter users shot back at Babers saying it’s a valuable tool for transparency and a way to hold the District government accountable for not getting bad drivers off the streets.

“People would stop using the DMV ticket search if they didn’t keep uncovering vehicles with $13,000 in unpaid tickets on them,” Alan Cole wrote. “The only interest people have in this database is the evidence of massive policy failure.”