The governor, City Council and Mayor have joined their forces to turn NYC school zone speed cameras back on.
The school year is starting in a week and parents of million schoolchildren, who are walking to and from school every day, are terrified that their kids will be under a higher risk to get into an accident on the road. The roads at 140 school-zones are no longer under speed-cameras’ control. Despite of months of fighting by the city and state officials for extending NYC’s life-saving school-zone speed camera program, cameras were turned off several weeks ago. Unfortunately there’s strong evidences that more drivers will speed near schools knowing that it would not be punished.
In order to get out from this emergency situation, NYC authority joined their efforts for an unprecedented move. They decided to transfer the power to pass the speed camera law from the state legislature to the city legislature. The governor Cuomo signed an executive order in regards to that this Monday. Hopefully the legislation to create NYC speed camera program will be passed on city level this week, since their previous agreement was already reached. “We came to the realization at the city level that there was a legal pathway to pass legislation that would give us the ability to put these cameras up and to provide a penalty for people who are speeding through a different process than what the state legislature did,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
