Illinois Speed Cameras Charged Over $90 Million In Tickets Last Year, New Stats Show

Those cameras are watching you.

Whether you want to take these stats as confirmation that Illinois drivers can't drive well or if you want to argue that the state of Illinois is doing too much, the numbers don't lie.

If there's any good news, the amount of speeding tickets cameras in Illinois issued went down from 2023-2024. Stats obtained by Illinois Policy show what's happened for the Chicagoland cameras alone, and it's wild.

The stats show Chicago speed cameras issued enough tickets worth $90.9 million to drivers in 2024. That's a fine every 24 seconds, totaling 1.84 million violations.

And that's just that area alone.

In 2023, the Chicagoland speed cameras issued over $102 million in fines and now, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is installing more speed cameras (50 of them, to be exact) to recoup some of that $11.3 million difference. 27 new speed cameras will be issuing tickets by the end of June.

About 65% of the revenue came from drivers who were going 6-10 mph over the speed limit. The good news though, about two-thirds of the fines were paid on time.

Besides the photo speed enforcement, Illinois also has red light-running cameras in multiple counties, including Cook, Lake, Kane, DuPage, McHenry, Will, Madison, and St. Clair.

As for parts of Illinois outside of Chicago, some areas (like Moline and Rock Island) don't use speed cameras, according to a 2021 report from WQAD. But what does happen in Illinois is that Illinois State Police will set up vans with photo enforcement across areas to catch speeders.

So you can only imagine how much money those tickets added to Chicagoland speed cameras (and red light-running cameras, for that matter) at the end of 2024.