Maybe you’ve cruised a little too fast down NE Marine Drive near Salty’s, or on the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway when headed toward Tito’s Taquitos. And maybe you were caught by “the flash”—you know, that uh-oh feeling of triggering a traffic enforcement camera.

Maybe you’ve thought, “How can I get out of this?” And maybe you oughta take it as a $170 lesson in slowing down. 

Unless you’re a keen chronicler of Portland’s speed limits and always come to a full stop before turning right on red, driving could soon become an expensive proposition. Fourteen traffic officers are returning to the streets after a two-year absence due to short-staffing, according to a spring announcement from Chuck Lovell, Portland’s police chief. The officers, predominantly motorcycle cops, will work from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. to catch speeders and drinkers on crash-prone roads.

At the same time, Oregon drivers will soon see a major expansion of speed enforcement cameras, following Gov. Tina Kotek’s spring signing of a law that allows all Oregon cities to operate speed-enforcement cameras around the clock. The fines are not mild: red light camera fines in Portland are typically $265; speed camera fines are usually $170. The efforts are meant to not just weed out dangerous drivers, but also counteract the widespread lack of perceived consequences to speeding. “That’s why we have speed limits,” says Mark Ginsberg, a Portland lawyer with a specialty in bicycle and traffic law, who in 2010 successfully fought his own red light ticket with mathematical calculations that demonstrated he didn’t run the light. “If you are the only person in the world, speed limits don’t matter. Speed limits are about other people and other people’s safety. And we’ve agreed as a society that we want to keep each other safe.”

Though ticket recipients gripe about the two-year spike to their auto insurance rates, speeding is a serious public policy matter: Portland is on track for a record number of pedestrian deaths this year, and fatalities were already on the rise in both 2021 and 2022, when 63 people died in traffic crashes in Portland, up from 35 in 2018 and 48 in 2019, according to the Portland Bureau of Transportation. A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and research by the Governors Highway Safety Association show that driver speeds crept up nationwide during the early days of the pandemic, and then never slowed. 

Currently, the city of Portland operates eight speed enforcement cameras, 10 cameras that catch red light runners, and one camera that flags drivers for both speeding and running red lights. In the coming years, existing red light cameras will be upgraded to the latter. At least four new speed cameras and one new red light camera are planned for crash-prone corridors in eastern Portland—placed there because more than half of traffic deaths in the city happen on just 8 percent of roads, says Dylan Rivera, a spokesperson for PBOT. “If we can make that relatively small number of streets safer, it can make an enormous difference in reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries in Portland,” he says.

The cameras work. Portland and Beaverton installed their fixed cameras in 2016–2017, after persuading the legislature to allow cities to expand enforcement beyond the mobile speed-detection vans allowed since the 1990s. A 2020 Portland study of eight cameras on high-crash roads showed a 94 percent decrease in traveling more than 10 mph over the speed limit. 

There are no secret speed cameras in Portland. PBOT posts signs ahead of all of them to urge people to slow down and to avoid citations, and the city lists their locations online. Drivers are warned with signs and reader boards that display speed, though drivers complain that these can be useless to those who turn into a monitored zone after the initial warning signs. Traffic apps, like Waze, also announce both speed and red light cameras. (One Portland motorcycle cop has been known to self-report his presence on Waze, “even though it won’t matter and people will still speed past me.”) 

Counterintuitively, the goal is for everyone to know the location of the speed traps. “When drivers know that there’s going to be enforcement, they don’t speed,” says Scott Kocher, a Portland lawyer. “And if there’s a fixed camera, at least 80 percent of drivers who know that it’s there don’t speed.” Beaverton, another early adopter of enforcement cameras, has found that 75 percent of the citations issued from its speed cameras went to those living outside Beaverton.

The cameras aren’t big moneymakers here, in part because they are designed to change behavior, not generate revenue. Last year, the city of Portland mailed 39,814 warnings and citations from speed cameras. For 2021 and 2022 combined, the fines totaled $1.8 million paid through the court and $1.5 million paid by drivers who took traffic safety classes (which keeps citations off of drivers’ records). This is pocket change compared to places that aim to generate income from speed cameras; Staten Island, smaller than Portland in both population and area, took in more than $15 million in fines in 2022 alone.

Kocher would like to see more dummy and mobile cameras, which would avoid the problem of drivers simply speeding up after the lights. He’d also like to see fines commensurate with income; safety class fees are already waived or reduced for low-income drivers. 

All of that said, there is one surefire way to avoid a citation, according to, well, everyone: safety advocates, PBOT, personal injury lawyers, and traffic police: Slow. Down.