Motor drivers undergo a road-wide project on Route 32 in Howard County. Photo by Bruce Despite.
A good increase for quotes released by speed cameras in highway work zone can bring tens of million dollars to the collection by the state.
The proposed growth is part of the effort to reduce the number of accidents in the highway work areas.
Lieutenant village. Aruna Miller (D) announced more than a dozen recommendations issued by the Working Area Safety Working Group. A transport engineer Miller presided over the panel. Brian p. Photo by Sears.
“The objective is to change the behavior of the driver, not to collect revenue from drivers,” Lieutenant village Aruna Miller (D) said, who testified in favor of the Bill before the Senate Judicial proceedings Committee.
The Senate Bill 479, a Moore Administration Bill, proposes the expansion of speed cameras in work areas across the state. The bill will also allow the state to go into unmanned systems and keep several cameras in the same work area.
“We really want to implement safe work areas,” Miller said.
Miller asked the committee to accept an amendment that would allow county and municipal governments to install cameras in local road work areas. The current law already allows such placements, but several counties do not participate because the fine goes to the state. The proposed amendment will allow the counties to maintain fine.
The extended enforcement work area was part of a set of recommendations of the safety work group. The village Wes Moore (D) had last year formed a panel after the death of six workers in a work area west of the Baltimore beltway.
Maryland’s Professional Safety and Health Office cited the State Highway Administration with “serious violations” related to the fatal accident.
The report said that failure to keep the signals near the work area exposed the workers by passing vehicles.
Moore tapped a traffic engineer Miller by profession to preside over the panel.
At any time, the state has about 300 highway work areas. Last year, according to Miller, more than 1,200 accidents occurred in those areas.
“So, for those who work on these sites, it’s not a matter of whether they will see an accident on the job site, when it was,” he said.
The work group issued more than a dozen recommendations, including the first and second crime to increase the penalty for the quotes released by the work zone speed cameras for the second crime. The punishment for a third or latter offense in the calendar year jumps for $ 1,000 per example.
Currently, the state issues $ 40 tickets that have no points to motorists, which exceed the speed limit to 12 mph or above.
According to a legislative analysis, in fiscal 2023, the state collected $ 9.7 million in 335,888 speed camera quotes in work areas.
Transport officials said that even when they do not expand the number of speed cameras, the number of quotes will increase and high fines are not implemented before January 1, 2025.
Additionally, the department estimates that it was released on average, approximately 208.88 cents per quotation – more than $ 70 million depending on the number of quotes released in FY 2023.
Analysts estimated that the quotations starting from January 1 would increase the revenue by $ 32.3 million. Out of this, about $ 26 million will go to the state highway administration for security sector security. Maryland will go to the state police for more than $ 6 million cars and other equipment.
Under the proposed amendment Miller, local and municipal governments that expand the use of cameras in working areas on local roads will have to keep that money in security programs.
Maryland adopted the use of manned motion cameras in highway work areas in 2009.
Former Democratic Sen John Giannti, who testified against the bill, said that the fined established 15 years ago was an agreement, to ensure that the state was not using cameras to padd their budget.
“We have a way to ensure that the government never has a conflict of interests between the interests of security and the interests of money,” Jiyanatti said, who worked in the Senate Judicial Action Committee, which worked on the first edition of the bill, which was passed by the Legislature by the Vito by the then gow. Bob Erlich (R).
Giannetti stated that “there is a real risk that cannot live in that way.”
Miller and Maryland Motor Vehicle Administrator Christine Nizer said that the only attention to changes is to change the driver behavior.
“These are all options: a driver makes an option to drive highly at the wheel wheel impaired or at high rates of speed,” Niger said. “Unfortunately, other people often suffer the consequences of those very poor decisions.”
Re -published