An Independent Look at Albany's school speed cameras: Part 1

The City of Albany’s Fiscal 2025 Adopted budget expects $6 million in speed camera revenue

“Efforts to calm traffic, including the installation of speed cameras near some city schools, have been successful” -  Police Chief Brendan Cox

“If you don’t want a ticket, don’t speed” - social media

“We should turn the cameras on only when students are actually going to and from school” - social media

“Not only must traffic experts deploy speed cameras thoughtfully and with an eye toward equity, but they also need to consider automated enforcement as just one of many tools for taming dangerous roads” - Philadelphia Speed Camera study 

The introduction of the City of Albany’s School Speed Camera system in Autumn 2024 brought out points of view ranging from support to dislike.  Drivers across the City understood that this is the new normal and they may have to adjust their driving behaviors in one or more ways.

The City of Albany’s 2025 approved budget expects $6 million of added revenue from the speed camera system, 2.7% of Albany’s total revenues.  In the 2025 Adopted budget this additional revenue can be found under “Traffic Viol/Pol Court Fines”, page 16.  The expected revenue growth exceeds the growth in every other revenue source, including the expected $5 million revenue growth in Capital City Funding that comes from New York State.

As we looked at the implementation of the speed camera system we had several questions on our mind:

1. Will the speed camera system generate the $6 million of expected revenue, or will the revenue be materially higher or lower?
2. Which locations generate the most revenue?
3. Who is getting issued a citation?
4. Do people pay their citations?
5. Based on answers to any of the above, what ability is there to change the system?

The answer to the first question is “no.”  Our analysis suggests that the 2025 actual revenue will be 60-70% less than the $6 million of budgeted revenue.  In this article we will describe how we came to this conclusion.  We will also answer the other questions to the best of our ability using data.

Note - in this article we do not analyze the safety benefits of the school speed camera system.  We have not yet found a dataset that enables us to perform this analysis.   We invite any reader with access to data, or thoughts on conducting analysis to connect with us to discuss

There are 18 operational locations with speed cameras.  Most locations monitor travel in both directions, for example at the Blessed Sacrament location on Central Ave speeds are measured both east- and west-bound.  The map above shows the locations of all speed camera system locations and when they came online (began issuing citations), color coded by month.

The speed camera technology partner is Sensys Gatso, a global tech company that supplies traffic management systems, among other things.

Albany entered into a new agreement with Gatso in April 2024; this agreement extends an existing agreement from 2019 whereby Gatso provided the City a traffic-control signal photo violation-monitoring system.

We can summarize the agreements:

1. The contract runs until 2029; the agreement can be terminated only by mutual agreement or for cause
2. The City and Gatso will select a minimum of 35 speed enforcement sites in a maximum of twenty school zones.  Think of a “school zone” as a school and a “speed enforcement site” is a street + directional of travel.  For example, “Western Ave at Eagle Point” is a school zone, and “Western Ave Eastbound” and “Western Ave Westbound” are speed enforcement sites
3. 8 of the school zones will come online by the start of the 2024-2025 school year
4. For each $50 citation the City will pay Gatso $33 (note that some media reports incorrectly claim that Gatso is paid 40% or $30 which is incorrect)
5. Gatso will charge and collect a $4/transaction processing fee, paid by the vehicle owner
6. Gatso pays all costs associated with the installation, operation and servicing of the speed camera infrastructure
7. The City of Albany may enter into an agreement with a collections agency and Gatso will support those efforts

In part 2 of our article we will make the City of Albany agreements available for download (along with the original FOIA’ed data).  If you are interested in seeing the agreements prior, drop us an email.

We can sum up a few points from the 126,037 citations that have been issued in our dataset over the lifetime of the system, from October 2024 through early June 2025.  

Total value of all citations - $6,301,850 

Total of paid citations - $4,229,600 (84,592 citations, 67% of all citations)

City of Albany net revenue, to date (citations paid x $17/citation) - $1,438,064

We wanted to understand the citation payment rate by evaluating citations that were issued more than two months ago, allowing recipients time to pay the citation.  As we write this in mid-June 2025 we focused on tickets issued prior to April 18, 2024.  The City issued 100,363 citations prior to April 18th, and 75,779 citations have been paid (76%).  Over 7,000 citations are noted as “Collections” which presumably means some type of agency or service is involved in getting citations paid.  

Citation revenue varies significantly by school location.  For each school we like looking at the median citation amount per day, rather than the average citation amount, which helps to minimize some of the extreme revenue that happens on snow days (everyone is driving slowly) and at the beginning of a location’s implementation (drivers haven’t aligned their behavior).   We will demonstrate later in this study how we see citations decreasing over time at most locations.  

The Median Citation Amount Per Day for all schools during this time period was $44,450, of which the City of Albany keeps 34% or $15,113/day.

How does the rate of citations vary during the day?  We looked at the time of citation, by hour, for all 126 thousand citations.  This was a surprising chart - citations are lowest in the morning, they increase dramatically after school is in session, they drop off at the end of the school day, and then increase at the end of the day.  

We can make some reasonable guesses that drivers travel more slowly when there are obvious signs of students.  There also is a group behavior effect - as more drivers travel slowly it causes the system to move at a slower rate.  

We can view the citations as the percentage of total citations issued per hour.  The midday hours each represent over 10% of issued citations.  We believe that this answers one of the questions - “Can we turn off the speed camera system midday when students are not outside?”  From a revenue perspective, if we turn off the speed cameras during the day (10am-2pm) we would lose half of the citation revenue.   

We wanted to analyze what happens to citations (and revenue) at locations over time.  We picked 6 of the locations that have been in place for the longest amount of time.  For each location we tracked the revenue using a 10 day rolling average of revenue, beginning with the 25th weekday that a location had been in operation. We started the calculation on the 25th day to eliminate the data (and citations) that come from the newness of the cameras.  We use a 10 day rolling average to moderate the impact of extreme citation days. 

For 5 of 6 locations we see a decline in citations and revenue over time.  “Delaware at TOAST Elementary” had their 10 day rolling revenue drop from $20,000+ to around $10,000.  “Washington Ave at Albany High” had their 10 day rolling revenue drop from a range of $40,000 to $60,000 down to a range of $15,000 to $20,000.

We believe that this is typical behavior.  Drivers will do one of two things - they will drive slower to avoid citations AND/OR they will find alternative routes that avoid the speed cameras.  Both of these behaviors decrease the amount of issued citations.

The one exception is the speed cameras at Western & Brevator by All Saints School.  While revenue dropped significantly after the location had been operational for a couple of months, revenue subsequently spiked.  The All Saints school location has an unusual month-by-month citation revenue picture, when looking at full months of speed camera operation:

Nov 2024 - $160,500 

Dec 2024 - $94,950 

Jan 2025- $99,400 

Feb 2025 - $78,650 

Mar 2025 - $236,400 

Apr 2025 - $157,100 

May 2025 - $170,400 

From what we can tell, over the Albany School District winter break (Feb 14-24) something happened with the rate of citations at the All Saints location.  When we reviewed the daily citation counts the number of citations post-winter break increased by a factor of 2-2.5x.  Perhaps the speed camera equipment was moved or fixed, or some other operational issue was fine tuned.

As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the City of Albany budgeted for $6 million of 2025 Fiscal Year revenue through this program.  This is a net revenue number, after accounting for payments to Gatso.  We want to understand - based on our current and predicted future citation and payment rates - is the City of Albany going to meet this revenue goal?

To do this we need to analyze two things - 1) our 2025 revenue  year to date (prior to June 5th, 2025), and 2) a reasonable prediction of revenue for the remainder of 2025 (after June 5th).  We aren’t sure of the exact accounting method that is used for recognizing revenue from speed cameras for the City’s Fiscal Year that runs from January 1 to December 31st.  For this analysis we will assume that citation revenue is recognized in the fiscal year that the citation was issued.  

Note that in our calculations below we will use the term “net revenue” to mean the amount of potential revenue from all tickets after Gatso has been paid; we will use the term “collected revenue” to mean the sum of all paid citations.

Year to date 2025, between January 1st and June 5th the City has issued 79,302 tickets representing $1,348,134 of net revenue.  Our collected revenue generation is dependent upon the rate of citation payment.  If we look at the revenue generation at various citation payment levels between 75-90% we see potential collected revenue that looks like this:   

We can also estimate the collected revenue for the remainder of 2025 (June school year + September through December).  There are 86 school days during that time period.  We can make a chart that projects three scenarios - a scenario based on the historical Median Citation Net Revenue per day ($15,130) plus two additional scenarios that account for revenue degradation over time.  

We can then create a matrix of collected revenue per day for the four different citation payment rates (ranging from what appears to be our existing payment rate of 75% to an ambitious 90% collection rate).   

From these two models we can look at a best case and worst case.  

BEST CASE

In our best case, we collect 90% of the citations from those issued year to date; we also collect 90% of the citations that will be issued between now and the end of the year.  For citations through the end of the year our Best Case assumes a rate equal to our historical $15.13k of net revenue per day.  If both of these happen we collect around $2.4 million ($1.213 + $1.171million) of revenue.  

This would represent a revenue shortfall of 60%.  To put this shortfall in context, it is an amount equal to the City of Albany’s entire 2025 Workers Compensation expenses.

WORST CASE

In our worst case, we only collect on 75% of the citations issued year to date, our median citation revenue for the remainder of 2025 drops to under $12k/day, and we collect on 75% of our future citations.  

This would lead to net revenue for 2025 of $1.779 million ($1.011 + $0.768 million).  This is a shortfall of 70% and, again for context, this shortfall is an amount equal to our projected 2025 Landfill Income.

Best case or worst case - we see a significant shortfall on revenue projections with both models suggesting revenue will be well under 50% of 2025 budgeted revenue.

With a big gap between budgeted revenue and predicted revenue, what can Albany do?  Let’s explore a few options:

1. Citations are currently issued for speeds 31 mph or greater.  Can Albany reduce the speed that citations are issued, and begin issuing tickets for 28, 29 and 30 mph?  No. Our understanding of the New York State school zone speed camera law is that tickets may only be issued for > 10 mph over the posted speed (20 mph).

2. Can Albany add additional school zones to the system, which would generate additional revenue?  Yes, Albany’s agreement with Gatso allows up to 20 school zones; there are currently 18 school zones in operation.  Whether the City could add additional, meaningfully revenue-generating school zones is an interesting question.

3.  Can Albany attempt to get to a payment rate of 100%?  Yes, although we expect that it is quite hard to get the last 5-10% of citation recipients to pay.  Focusing on the highest payment rate possible could be the only realistic tool that the City has to maximize revenue. 

In our part 2 article that will come out later in June or in early July we will ask a few questions:

• Who receives citations and what do we know about them (or not)?  
• Are there any unintended consequences of the speed camera program?
• What could or should Albany do next?

Have questions or comments on part 1 of our article?  Email us at albanydatastories@gmail.com

Wonder what data stories we are working on next?  See our current queue here!  We are always looking for people to suggest additional stories and people who want to assist with any data analysis and authoring.