Capital Beltway Photo-radar Demonstration Project: Site Visit Report

About the report:

Speeding on the Capital Beltway (Interstate 495 around Washington, D.C.) has long posed a traffic safety and incident management problem for local officials. As the Beltway expanded from 4 lanes to as many as 8 lanes, shoulder and median areas providing places for police officers to "pull over" speeding drivers were drastically reduced. As traffic volume on the facility increased, the ability of officers to safely stop single vehicles for speeding decreased. By 1989, both the Virginia Department of State Police and its Maryland counterpart abandoned traditional speed enforcement on the Beltway and began looking for innovative ways to enforce the speed laws.

Photo-radar, in use in Europe for over 30 years, was an obvious technology for study. Photo-radar equipment combines a camera and radar with electronic controls to detect and photograph speeding vehicles. There were two locations in the United States where photo-radar was used for speed enforcement Pasadena, California and Paradise Valley, Arizona. Interviews concentrated on the users' experiences and their methods of deploying photo-radar, although the manufacturers' representatives were present. The interviews sought to discover how photo-radar applications in Pasadena and Paradise Valley could be applied to other American cities, and what had been learned about photo-radar program development, court liaison, and constitutionality.

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