Beepr

Miami-Dade has collected $23 million from school-zone cameras. Nobody has published whether anyone got safer.

2026-08-11 · Beepr

Miami-Dade County's school-zone speed camera program went live in November 2024. Since then it has issued 236,573 citations and collected more than $23 million. In the first quarter of 2026, camera citations made up 68% of all speeding tickets in the county — 51,721 of 76,316.

Those numbers are published, audited, and easy to find. Here is the number that is not published anywhere: how many crashes, injuries, or deaths in Miami-Dade school zones went up or down after the cameras were installed.

This isn't an oversight. It's the design.

Florida Statute §316.1896(16)(c) requires the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to report annually to the Governor, the Senate President, and the House Speaker on school-zone camera systems. Those reports exist. They count violations, citations, and revenue.

They do not measure safety, and FLHSMV says so itself. From the department's own FY 2024-25 School Bus & School Zone Camera summary report, verbatim:

"…the available data is not yet sufficient to support meaningful trend analysis or safety impact assessments."

"The locational data submitted to the department does not support a crash analysis for School Zone crashes."

In fairness, the department attributes this to the early stage of statewide deployment and to reporting practices that "varied widely among participating entities." That's a reason. It is not a plan. The same report publishes detailed school bus crash data broken out by injury severity — so the capability exists; it simply was not built for school zones, while the citation and revenue pipeline was built immediately and works perfectly.

So after $23 million and a quarter-million tickets, the honest answer to "did this make children safer?" is: nobody knows, and no one is required to find out.

What the independent research actually says

We are not going to tell you speed cameras don't work. The evidence says otherwise, and pretending it doesn't would be the same trick we're objecting to.

The strongest study is the Cochrane systematic review (Wilson, Willis, Hendrikz, Le Brocque & Bellamy, 2010), which pooled 35 studies. It found average speed reductions of 1–15%, reductions in the share of drivers speeding of 14–65%, and crash reductions near camera sites ranging from 8–49%. It was funded by the University of Queensland, Australia's Motor Accident Insurance Commission, and SWOV Netherlands — no camera-vendor money — and the authors declared no conflicts.

It also says something the camera industry rarely quotes: the review flags a "lack of methodological rigour" in the underlying literature and concludes the magnitude of the effect "is currently not deducible due to heterogeneity." Direction: positive. Size: unknown.

Two caveats belong next to it. Much camera research suffers from regression to the mean — cameras get installed where crashes recently spiked, and spikes fall back toward average on their own. And the most-cited American advocate for camera enforcement, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, has been funded exclusively by auto insurers since 1959, which is a structural interest worth naming even though insurers benefit from fewer crashes.

The fair summary: cameras probably do slow traffic. How much, and whether Miami-Dade's specific program did, are open questions — and only one party can answer the second one.

Who gets paid, and how

Miami-Dade's school-zone vendor takes roughly 20% of fine revenue — about $20 of your $100. A contractor paid per citation has no financial interest in fewer citations. When the county identified 206 potential enforcement zones, that was simultaneously a safety survey and a market forecast.

Zooming out to the industry: automated-enforcement vendors have a documented criminal record in how these contracts get sold. Redflex Traffic Systems' CEO was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison over a $2 million bribery scheme involving a Chicago official; the company entered a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, and a Redflex employee admitted to bribing officials across 13 states, Florida among them. Redflex was subsequently absorbed into Verra Mobility, formerly American Traffic Solutions.

To be precise, because the names are confusingly similar: Miami-Dade's school-zone vendor is RedSpeed, which is a different company from Redflex and is not implicated in any of the above. We are describing the industry's procurement history, not making an allegation about the county's current vendor.

The questions we're asking

We've filed a public-records request with Miami-Dade County for:

If that data exists, it should be public and we'll publish it whatever it says — including if it shows the program working. If it doesn't exist, then a $23 million program has been running for nearly two years with no mechanism to know whether it achieved its stated purpose, and that is the story.

Where we stand, plainly

Slow down in school zones. That part isn't complicated, and it's the outcome everyone claims to want.

But note what happened in New York City, whose school-zone camera program is the most-studied in the country: citations fell roughly 75% within two years as drivers adapted. That's the program working as advertised — behavior changed, revenue collapsed. A program designed for compliance should expect its own revenue to fall. A program whose budget depends on the revenue cannot.

Beepr produces that same adaptation directly: a beep before the zone, so drivers slow down where it matters and keep the $100. If the county's goal is slower school zones, we're on the same side. If the goal is $2 million a month, we're a problem. We're comfortable letting them say which.

Sources

Corrections are welcome and will be published: data@getbeepr.com. Our camera map is free to browse at getbeepr.com/cameras/miami-dade.

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