Project Summary
The California Legislature passed Assembly Bill (AB) 645 in 2023, which authorizes a speed safety camera pilot program in six cities to reduce speeding and improve traffic safety, particularly in high-crash areas. This research evaluates the safety impacts of speed camera installation in San Francisco—the first city to implement a pilot—using telematics data, traffic volume and speed pattern data, and citation information. The contributions of this work are threefold. (1) The project reviews existing literature on the effects of speed camera installations and other forms of automated speed enforcement to contextualize our findings. (2) This work assesses changes in speeding behavior before and after camera deployment using a bi-level analytical framework. At the macroscopic level, the research team measures aggregate changes in speeding patterns using empirical methods. At the microscopic level, the team analyzes individual driving behavior—such as speed adjustments and potential route detours near camera zones—based on telematics data to identify enforcement avoidance behavior. (3) The project identifies the equity implications of speed enforcement by analyzing the geographic distribution of citations in relation to neighborhood demographics.
