Beyond Tickets: Building an Equitable Vision for Street Safety in Seattle
- May 15, 2025
Blog post by Whose Streets? Our Streets!, an independent BIPOC-led group fiscally sponsored by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways
This week, Seattle City Council’s Transportation Committee finalized legislation governing the use of automated speed ticketing in Seattle. The new legislation expands automated enforcement in Seattle, setting the stage for doubling the number of school zone speed cameras this summer and creating a new 24-hour speed camera program to be piloted later this year.
Whose Streets? Our Streets! (WSOS) believes Seattle residents deserve safe streets. And we believe that long-overdue physical safety improvements, not punitive enforcement, are the best way to curb dangerous speeding on most streets. We have been pushing the city for years for data-driven, equitable policies for automated ticketing that reflect nationally accepted best practices, as well as deep BIPOC community engagement that we have been conducting since 2022, which will make camera programs more fair and effective.
THANK YOU to everyone who helped spread the word and push councilmembers to make this legislation more transparent and equitable. Our collective advocacy is effective:
- Strengthened protections to ensure ticket revenue goes more directly to slow down speeding.
- Expanded who gets warnings and standardized the warning policy to cover the first 30 days of all new camera locations. SDOT’s data shows that warnings are 95% effective at preventing second violations.
- Prioritized the consideration of physical street improvements before cameras go in. Inexpensive street safety measures like speed cushions and stop signs slow down speeding drivers 24/7 without financial burdens or surveillance concerns.
- Added a few data privacy protections.
This legislation is just a starting point. Whose Streets? Our Streets! will continue to push for our longer-term vision for this program as it is implemented by SDOT, including tiered ticketing structures, expanded alternative payment options, and moving ticket review to SDOT staff instead of the Seattle Police Department.