BY DENNIS LYNCH | State politicians recently unveiled a bill to suspend a motorist’s license for two months if a judge convicts him or her of speeding in a school zone three times over the course of 18 months.
Assemblymember Deborah Glick and State Senator Jose Peralta, of Queens, announced their bill outside P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village. Glick called the measures an effort at behavior modification, not driver penalization.
“We don’t want people to lose their license, we want them to slow down,” she said. “We hope that after the first infraction where someone is caught on a speed camera, that they then change their behavior. But if they don’t, if they are repeat offenders, you have to take a more serious sanction.”
The legislators’ bills will hit the floor of their chambers when they return to session in January. They said they believe a two-month suspension looming over drivers’ heads is enough to make them slow down. But Glick added, “You have to balance the penalty with the ability to pass the legislation.”
The measure goes hand in hand with the two pols’ bills to put speed cameras around more schools in the city and to keep them on 24 hours a day – instead of only operating from an hour before school to an hour after school, as 140 cameras part of a pilot program currently do.
The city installed those 100 fixed cameras and 40 mobile speed cameras at 140 school zones around the city at the start of the school year last fall. Daily speeding violations have since dropped “by an average of 60 percent” in those areas, according to the Department of Transportation.
The lawmakers referred their identical Assembly and Senate bills — A09861 and S07776 – to their respective transportation committees in May and June. However, neither committee approved its version of the bill before the end of the last legislative session in July.
Critics have called speed cameras just a way for the city and state to rake in cash on the backs of drivers. However, a WNYC analysis of speeding violations around the city’s own speed cameras showed that the number of speeding tickets issues “fell steadily over time,” implying that drivers learned to slow down where the city installed stationary cameras.
The license-suspension legislation would take effect across the state, while the speed-camera legislation the pair have put together would only affect the city.
