A pedestrian struck by a vehicle traveling at 30 miles an hour is twice as likely to be killed as a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at 25 miles an hour.
Now imagine that pedestrian is a 7-year-old girl and that vehicle is a one-ton pickup truck traveling at 50 miles an hour in a school zone. The odds are not in her favor that she’ll be coming home from school that day.
“In the collision of car versus human, the car always wins,” said Jordan Swonger, a law enforcement veteran with over 20 years’ experience. Seven years of that time was spent as a consultant for the Revenue Authority of Prince George’s County, Maryland, which oversees all automated enforcement programs for the county, including school zone speed. Currently, Swonger serves as project manager for JENOPTIK Smart Mobility Solutions.
“The sight lines on a regular consumer pickup truck are worse than the military’s Abrams tanks,” he said. “You’re putting three tons of steel with bad sight lines in a school zone in a situation where we already know that [in] car versus human, the human loses. And then on top of that, these are little humans.”
This scenario is not an exaggeration. Jenoptik conducted a survey of over 25,000 vehicles in Palm Beach County, Florida that showed over 70 percent of drivers are speeding more than 20 miles per hour over the speed limit during morning drop-offs and afternoon pickups. Over 30 percent of those violators exceeded 30 miles an hour over the speed limit.
“If anywhere, school zones are the places where people should be super hypervigilant about how fast they’re going and how they’re handling their vehicles,” said Swonger. “If you just drive around and look, the majority of people are on their cell phones. They’re distracted. They’re not paying attention to begin with, but they’re still operating tons of metal on a roadway with bad sight lines where they might not even see a child step off a curb to cross the street to go to school. Twenty versus 30 miles an hour doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but it has catastrophic implications for survivability.”
Maintaining traffic enforcement when priorities shift
It can be challenging to justify spending officer resources on traffic enforcement when law enforcement agencies’ budgets and forces are stretched and priorities shift toward violent crime. While automated enforcement can’t replace an officer on traffic safety duty, it can go a long way to help fill in the gaps.
In the mid-2000s, as violent crime became widespread in Baltimore County and other areas, traffic enforcement had become such a low priority that officers were no longer focusing on it, leaving significant gaps in overall enforcement. As a result, many drivers who should have been stopped were routinely slipping through unnoticed. Recognizing this strain on resources, state leaders saw a clear need to ease the burden on law enforcement. This realization ultimately led the state of Maryland to pass legislation authorizing automated speed enforcement in work zones and school zones as a way to fill those gaps and improve traffic safety.
As departments across the state clamored to get automated enforcement systems up and running, Swonger – then a detective with Prince George’s County Police Department – was tapped to help set up a traffic enforcement program for the city of College Park, which houses the University of Maryland’s flagship campus.
“College kids are typically in their own world. They’re not really paying attention. So there were a lot of kids getting hit crossing major roadways,” Swonger recounted.
Though well intentioned, automated traffic enforcement programs across the state had a bumpy start. “We were all just grasping in the dark. Nobody really knew what they were doing,” he said. Further, it was discovered that Baltimore was working on an incentivized system where the vendor got paid according to the number of violations, whether valid or not. While Prince George’s County didn’t have that issue, “it caused a lot of knee-jerk reactions which changed how the department enforced and collected on traffic violations.”
The automated enforcement programs provided coverage while taking some of the strain off officers focused on violent crime. “It also had a surprising twofold benefit for us. The automated enforcement slowed people down but it also gave us an intelligence stream for solving other crimes and gathering license plate information,” said Swonger. “It gave us another tool in the tool belt for the higher-level crime occurring in our neighborhoods.”
Revenue, reinvestment and public perception
The perception lingers that automated enforcement is a money grab.
“We don’t hide the ball on people. It’s not an ‘I gotcha’ moment. We want them to know there are cameras there. We want them to know enforcement is occurring and it’s a voluntary program,” said Swonger. “The only people we ever give tickets to are the people that volunteer to speed through a school zone. If there isn’t a police officer there to write you a ticket, our camera is there to hold you accountable.”
To avoid negative public perception, Swonger advises departments to show the community revenues being generated from automated enforcement in school zones are being used to bolster school zone safety, whether that’s increasing the size of sidewalks, increased signage or installing crosswalks and flashing lights.
“The automated enforcement camera is an unblinking eye that records every single vehicle speeding through the school zone and sends them a notice to make them aware of what they’re doing,” said Swonger. “Yes, there’s a monetary impact with that, but the overall goal is changing driver behavior.”
The benchmark of success
An independent study for New York City’s Automated Speed Enforcement Program published in 2024 utilized over 2,100 Jenoptik cameras installed across 750 separate school zones. It found that, as of December 2020, speeding at fixed camera locations dropped, on average, 72 percent, with some corridors reducing speeding by 90 percent.
The mark of a truly successful school zone speed enforcement program, says Swonger, is a reduction in the number of vehicles exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 to 20 miles an hour.
“Driving down those numbers is the biggest win from a program because each increase in speed takes away your options. It decreases reaction time. It decreases the time you have to choose an alternate route to avoid a collision,” he said, “and it decreases the chance a child can get out of the way of your vehicle.”
Staff shortages and increasing demands law enforcement spend their efforts fighting crime must be weighed against increasing size of vehicles, driver distraction and the special vulnerability of children.
“Automated speed enforcement in school zones should be part of any agency’s holistic approach to keeping children safe on our shared path to zero roadway deaths,” said Swonger.
For more information on Jenoptik’s automated school zone camera systems, complete the information form or visit Jenoptik.
