In December of 2021 the Washington Post published a story about the struggles DC was having with an increase in reckless driving. This was visible not just in terms of speeding tickets but also in terms of deaths and injuries on the road.

The District has recorded 40 traffic fatalities this year — three more than occurred in 2020 — and it is poised to end the year with the most deaths since 2007, when 54 road fatalities occurred. City data shows more than 4,000 people have been injured this year.

Like any other type of crime, the people who cause these accidents usually aren’t first time offenders. In fact, DC has over 100 speed cameras to issue tickets automatically. The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who receive tickets and simply never pay them because they know there are no consequences.

About 550,000 vehicles with D.C., Maryland or Virginia tags have two or more unpaid parking or traffic tickets at least 60 days old and are eligible to be booted, Cheh said. She said many involve dangerous driving: Roughly 5,000 vehicles have tickets for traveling at least 21 mph over the speed limit, another 150,000 for running a red light and about 50,000 have fines for running a stop sign.

There are more than 13,000 drivers who owe at least $5,000 in unpaid tickets and fees. The 200 worst drivers owe $7.6 million. Clearly, they’ve learned the tickets and the rules of the road mean nothing to them.

That’s because DC only has two ways of punishing drivers who fail to pay tickets, one is to boot their car and the other is to tow it. Neither solution works well for drivers in Virginia or Maryland who park well outside the city limits overnight. Unless those cars happen to be spotted on a public street in DC during the day, there’s no punishment of any kind for these drivers. So, for instance, if a driver knows he or she can park in a private lot whenever they’re in the city (a spot where parking enforcement can’t boot or tow), they have nothing to fear from driving like Mad Max to and from work every day.

Today, the Post has a follow up about a recently deadly accident in which the driver had nearly 50 unpaid speeding tickets including at least one from earlier the same day. [Emphasis added]

In the wee hours of March 15, the driver of an SUV fleeing a traffic stop collided with a sedan, killing its occupants — a 42-year-old Lyft driver and two men, ages 22 and 23, on their way home from a night out in D.C. According to city records, as of late April, the SUV had 49 outstanding tickets with fines totaling $17,280. The records are linked to violations involving the vehicle, rather than a specific driver.

“D.C. had data showing that this driver was an extreme risk to life and welfare,” said Ryan Calder, an assistant professor of environmental health and policy at Virginia Tech who studies traffic collisions and helped to draft a petition that calls on the city to remove dangerous drivers from roads. “And then, very predictably, the driver of the car annihilated three people in a horrific collision. And that was the very predictable outcome of this breakdown in governance.”…

Park Police said the traffic stop that preceded the collision was for a speeding violation that an officer had observed. At the time, the SUV had more than 40 outstanding traffic tickets with fines totaling $12,300. The Washington Post used TV news footage of the license plate to link the vehicle to the outstanding tickets. Most of the violations, listed on the DMV website, were for speeding. At least six citations since late October 2022 were for driving at least 25 mph over the speed limit.

In retrospect it doesn’t seem like much of a surprise that this particular driver was involved in a deadly accident. If you’re routinely driving 25+ over the limit, which many states consider reckless driving, you’re more likely to have an accident. But the driver racked up 49 tickets knowing he would never pay any of them. And because there was zero penalty for what he was doing he kept it up until he killed three people.

Why can’t the city do something about these drivers before someone is killed or injured? As mentioned above, there’s no agreement with Maryland or Virginia to hold drivers accountable for anything they’ve done in the city limits. Also, DC police don’t have information on drivers’ speeding tickets. So even if you get pulled over for speeding by an actual cop and you owe the city $10,000 in unpaid tickets for previous speeding incidents, that cop won’t know about it. It’s a system that seems designed to make sure there are no consequences.

None of us like speeding tickets, especially not the camera based kind. The point is that you can’t have a system of laws in which some people decide they can do whatever they want without consequences. That creates a sense of lawlessness and actual danger for everyone else.

DC needs to create a better system that actually holds people accountable for their behavior in public. That means working out some type of reciprocity with neighboring states and making it possible for police to identify and punish the worst offenders. Law and order has to apply on the roads as well.