BALTIMORE — The speed limit sign says "photo enforced," but these cameras can only do so much. They can easily catch speeding drivers, but making them pay up is another story.
“I think it was most surprising to me is just the amount of unpaid violations that we have and the lack of recovery the city really has - the ability for the city to recover those fines,” Jed Weeks, executive director of the for the local bike safety advocacy organization, Bikemore, said.
Weeks and his team at Bikemore analyzed publicly available data from Baltimore's automated traffic violation enforcement system. His team found that in 2024, just 10 of the city's "super-speeders," as Bikemore called them, were responsible for 1,117 speeding tickets, and $81,341 in unpaid tickets. The top five - and six of the 10 - have Virginia tags.
Most of the so-called super speeders had been caught at the same location dozens of times, with one driver racking up 75 tickets - which would total about $3,000 - at just one camera along the Jones Falls Expressway.
“You just have this small subset of folks that just don't care. They've broken the social contract. They're willing to just be completely reckless, and those are the folks who really need to target for enforcement,” Weeks told WMAR-2 News.
We took a look at the data ourselves and found that about 86% of speeding tickets for Virginia-tagged vehicles went unpaid in 2024 in Baltimore City.
Virginia allows people to register their cars there even if they don't live in the state. A big incentive for Marylanders to do that used to be because Virginia didn't require drivers to get insurance. The state changed that law last summer. Still, incentives remain for those who want to bypass emissions inspections or avoid paying traffic citations.
“We do not have reciprocity with Virginia,” Weeks explained. So with “a Maryland tag, if you go to get your tag renewed or your registration renewed, if you've not paid those fines, you're gonna need to pay those fines before you can register your car again. But in Virginia they can just keep re-registering their car without paying those fines.”
By law, Maryland does require all residents to register their vehicles with the state's Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA). Penalties include a fine or eventually, seizing the license plate. But the MVA says it's tough to enforce. In a recent report to the Governor on this issue, the MVA pointed to a case study in which a driver's VA tags were seized, and they just ordered replacement tags and faced no further repercussions.
According to that report, in 2023 the MVA sent letters to more than 33,000 drivers who had a Maryland address but a Virginia registration - informing them of the law, and the penalties. About 800, just over 2% of those drivers, actually registered their vehicle properly as a result. If the MVA wanted to cite the thousands of others remaining, there'd have to be a formal investigation to officially prove the driver is in violation of the law. As a MVA spokesperson explains to WMAR-2 News: "Issuing citations for foreign registration violations requires an investigation because not every vehicle on the list is necessarily in violation of the foreign registration law due to various extraneous circumstances, applicable waivers, etc. Therefore, being on the list does not establish probable cause, and each vehicle must be investigated."
In the report, the MVA says the out-of-state plate problem is costing the state millions in lost revenue. And Bikemore's Jed Weeks is concerned the lack of accountability for speeding drivers could also cost lives. The cameras are only triggered when someone is driving 12 miles an hour above the speed limit. In a school zone - that means the driver is traveling about 40 miles an hour, or more.
“The cameras are basically triggering at where it becomes fatal for a pedestrian in a crash,” Weeks said. “So we set a pretty high threshold and the threshold is death."
State delegates in the House tried to pass legislation this year to increase penalties and enforcement for drivers with out-of-state plates, such as towing the noncompliant vehicle, but it never made it out of committee.
Washington D.C. has long had this problem too, and recently started cracking down. The D.C. City Council authorized the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) to go after drivers for unpaid traffic violations in civil court, under what's called the "STEER Act." According to the Attorney General’s office, the law “enables OAG to hold drivers who flout DC traffic laws accountable by seeking monetary judgments against them even if they do not live in DC.”
The AG's office announced lawsuits against three drivers back in February. All three of them live in Maryland, so they had been able to skirt D.C.'s traffic enforcement - until now. They each owe the District tens of thousands of dollars. And the OAG announced another round of lawsuits just yesterday against five Virginia drivers and one Maryland driver, who has more than 300 unpaid speeding tickets from over the course of two years, and owes D.C more than $187,000 himself alone.
In our state, these are considered municipal debts, so they wouldn't fall under the purview of the Maryland Attorney General's Office. We reached out to the Baltimore City Solicitor within the City's Law Department asking if they'd be willing to do something similar to D.C. to enforce the payment of traffic citations, but haven't heard back.