Traffic rolls south past the flashing light in the North Albany Road school zone on May 7, 2026.
The flashing lights in the North Albany Road school zone worked. That is, they worked as intended. The number of speeding tickets is down, way down.
The Albany Police Department has posted the May statistics for the four intersections where vendor Verra Mobility is running camera systems to detect speed and red-light violations.
In the school zone on North Albany Road, speed violations resulting in tickets in May were down more than 90 percent from April.
In May the cameras, at North Albany Road and Thornton Lake Drive, caught only 24 speed violations, compared to 388 the month before.
At the insistence of the city council, particularly Councilor Steph Newton, the city had the flashing lights installed after a number of drivers last year were confused by “no-school-today” signs and got speeding tickets. The flashing lights started operating toward the end of April.
With the lights in place and operating, the 20-mph school zone speed limit is in effect only when children are arriving or leaving, no longer for 10 hours every school day. The rest of the time the posted speed is 40 mph.
The monthly dashboard for May shows a total of 217 speed and 32 red-light citations. In terms of ticket production, the cameras on Santiam Road and Geary Street were the leaders, with 147 for speeding and two for red lights.
You can look up the dashboard here and check the numbers yourself.
What the dashboard does not show is whether the cameras have reduced collisions since they were installed in late 2024. The police department does publish monthly crash reports, but the reports don’t clearly show just where collisions happened, and there is no before-and-after comparison for the sites where traffic cameras were installed. (hh)
Now if they could just put those lights at all school zones. There’s still too many where you have to drive 20 for 10 hours when there isn’t a soul around.
Well, I can guarantee you they didn’t reduce the number of collisions on North Albany rd, because there were none to reduce. If anything I’ve been more distracted driving through there. Was/is nothing more than a tax that they didn’t have to put to vote.
So the real problem could have been solved with Flashing lights instead of Big Brother in a box.
It’s nice to know that something I’ve been supporting since before the cameras were installed, has finally worked! I think we can all say now The lights work better than the cameras. Cameras were just good at giving tickets instead of actually making people aware. I agree flashing light should be used at all the schools.
The only salient question??? are we safer or just taxed more?
Problem here was never road, sign, lights, no lights, camera, no camera, rain, mud, wind, sun, moon, animals, taxes, no taxes, speed, no speed, train, bus, bicycle, low flying aircraft, drones, bugs, trees… nobody will admit the problem, only make excuses for ignorance and obliviousness of drivers. Today Sunday and people driving 20 mph in school zone on Sunday. You can’t fix that with flashing lights.
STUNNING—it took this long to find a solution that came from the public, as city staff , and council couldn’t reasonably find a solution, and the public had to force their input, but thank you for the common sense flashing lights