Opinion | Tighten D.C.’s traffic rules — and enforce them

“Every driver who ignores not only the law but also the standards of human decency between drivers and pedestrians is a source of trauma for my family and me, and to see it happen repeatedly is all the more horrifying,” wrote Hart.

Material for horrification is, indeed, in ample supply on D.C.’s streets. Motorists blow through stop signs; treat the byways like speedways; run through red lights; park in bike lanes, traffic lanes or bus lanes; and terrorize pedestrians. D.C.-area residents travel in a 61-square-mile land of scofflaws.

With an eye toward preventing further roadway tragedies, the D.C. Council is now considering traffic accountability measures. They’re a helpful, though partial, means of addressing an advancing scourge in D.C.

The urgency of responding came into focus this March, when a D.C. motorist in a Lexus SUV fled a police stop and sped down Rock Creek Parkway. The driver, Nakita Marie Walker, veered into oncoming traffic and collided with a Honda, whose occupants — 42-year-old Lyft driver Mohamed Kamara and riders Olvin Torres Velasquez and Jonathan Cabrera Mendez, both in their 20s — died in the crash. Walker had racked up at least five DUIs in D.C. and Virginia, and her vehicle had 38 outstanding speeding violations.

Traffic fatalities in D.C. are riding a troublesome curve, with a 48 percent increase from the same period last year.

Responsibility for enforcing D.C.’s traffic rules is a multiagency affair. The D.C. police department does the work of traditional police departments everywhere, stopping motorists for infractions, including speeding, illegal U-turns, failure to obey signs and so on. According to one of the department’s annual reports, it issued 5,794 speeding citations in 2021. Of those, 705 citations punished motorists for exceeding the posted limit by more than 25 mph.

Help comes from the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), which manages the city’s expanding flank of automated traffic enforcement (ATE) cameras. There are about 130 such cameras dispersed across D.C. for the enforcement of stop signs, red lights and speed limits. Pursuant to Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s (D) latest budget, hundreds of additional cameras are slated for installation.

This system is not working.

The D.C. police department is an unreliable first line of defense against traffic mayhem, a force easily distracted by pursuits sexier than cracking down on stop-sign offenders; some of its officers have even committed newsworthy traffic offenses of their own. The city’s Police Reform Commission has recommended transferring authority for enforcing some traffic regulations to DDOT. (A senior police official defended the department’s commitment to this area, pointing to the relaunch of traffic-compliance checkpoints and the deployment of three overtime police vehicles specifically focused on traffic enforcement.)

D.C.’s ATE tickets also are not nearly as effective as they could be. A recent Post analysis found that more than 3 million camera-issued tickets, representing $840.8 million, have gone unpaid since 2000. Vehicles from Maryland and Virginia rack up the preponderance of photo-issued infractions and parking tickets. Yet motorists in those jurisdictions have little incentive to pay up, because their states’ regulatory agencies don’t require that they do so. D.C. has attempted to negotiate with its neighbors to reach reciprocity agreements for traffic-camera tickets, to no avail.

D.C., too, has dropped a rule stopping people with unpaid fines exceeding $100 from renewing their driver’s licenses, on the rationale that this “clean hands” requirement discriminated against low-income, and mostly Black, D.C. residents. Yet it also eliminates a substantial consequence of routine dangerous driving.

Meanwhile, March’s fatal Rock Creek Parkway crash exposed gaps in D.C.’s traffic-enforcement bureaucracy. After Deputy Mayor for Operations and Infrastructure Lucinda M. Babers claimed that the city’s Department of Motor Vehicles never received notifications of Walker’s DUI convictions, the D.C. Superior Court dug up records indicating that it had issued those notifications. DMV officials cited a miscommunication and are undertaking a review to determine whether DMV records align with court convictions.

All this dysfunction shows that D.C. has drifted away from the dictum of every driver’s ed instructor — that driving is a privilege and not a right. Correcting that imbalance will take political will. D.C. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) proposes using ATE cameras to assess points against drivers’ records rather than just issuing fines to offending vehicles’ registrants. There are logistical and due-process considerations; the ATE technology must capture an image of an offending car’s driver, and an efficient appeals procedure is critical. But motorists might respect cameras that can jeopardize their licenses.

Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), meanwhile, has advanced a wide-ranging reform proposal that would allow the city to suspend the driving privileges of people who rack up multiple fines for certain offenses in a six-month period. The penalties would apply whether or not the fines were paid, preventing dangerous drivers from buying their way out of consequences. The bill would also empower the D.C. attorney general to pursue civil proceedings against both D.C. and out-of-state scofflaws.

These are good ideas. But revised fine structures and legal weapons can do only so much. In the long term, D.C. should be more aggressive in implementing new road designs — narrower lanes, bike lanes and other traffic-calming elements. Anything that will signal to drivers that the road is not a racetrack.