Where DC's 330 enforcement cameras stand, and what each one watches

On DC295 northbound, a twentieth of a mile south of Exit 1 in Bellevue, a speed camera on a 50 mph stretch wrote 100,096 tickets in the twelve months to September 2026. A DC resident has now put that camera, and every other fixed one in the District, on a single public map: the stretch of street each watches, the direction it checks, the posted limit, and a year of monthly counts. PoPville ran it on 7 October 2026 as a reader project. It is not DDOT's, and it is not ours.

The DC295 figure is DDOT's own, and I went and got it rather than take the map's word. Querying the Automated Safety Cameras violation table on 2026-10-22 for enforcement space ATE 0418, restricted to the twelve months the camera was live, returns 100,096 speed tickets: a low of 3,558 in November 2025, a high of 12,920 in September 2026. The map gives 100,093 for the same camera. Its snapshot was built on 2026-10-06, and DDOT has since revised that September figure up by three. Three in a hundred thousand is nothing, but it tells you the table is still settling weeks after a month closes, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes a single number off it.

What the map draws

Counted from the map's own embedded data on 2026-10-22, it places 330 fixed cameras: 227 speed, 65 red light, 37 stop sign, and one lone truck restriction camera that managed 44 tickets all year. The page says it is current to 19 October 2026, with DDOT's last record dated 6 October. Its headline window is October 2025 to September 2026, and across those 330 cameras it counts 2,439,553 tickets, which it puts at one every 12.9 seconds.

Seeing them all at once is what makes the map worth opening, because several things only show up in aggregate.

• 177 of the 227 speed cameras stand on streets posted at 25 mph, counted from the map's data on 2026-10-22, and only six sit on anything posted above 40 mph. This is enforcement pointed at residential streets, with DC295 as the loud exception.
• 290 of the 330 cameras issued at least one ticket in the window and the median camera issued 4,939, so the distribution is nothing like flat: the busiest ten took 22.9% of the year's total between them, a figure the map states on its front page.
• Wards 5 and 7 account for 1,110,986 tickets of the 2,439,553, or 45.5%, from 145 of the 330 cameras, counted from the same data on 2026-10-22. Ward 1, with 27 cameras, accounts for 56,014.
• Thirty-two cameras on the map are not fining yet and seven more are inside a warning period. Eleven of those 39 sit within a few blocks of Florida Avenue, NE and NW, which is as close to a published roadmap of where enforcement goes next as a driver is likely to get.

What it leaves out, and why that matters

The map is not the whole enforcement network. Summing DDOT's own table for the same twelve live months across every enforcement type gives 2,649,726 tickets, about 210,000 more than the map counts. The difference is the camera types the map does not draw: 69,740 bus lane, 44,817 bus zone, 10,638 truck restriction and 638 school bus stop-arm tickets, from the violation table queried on 2026-10-22. The map's data carries 210 Clear Lane units and 25 School Bus units flagged as unplaceable, and DDOT's camera layer explains that plainly enough: it is published as a table with no geometry, and there will be records with null coordinate values. A camera without coordinates cannot be drawn by anybody, however good their map.

That is the thread running through all of this. Everything the map shows exists because DDOT publishes the locations, the posted limits, the statuses and the monthly counts as open data under a Creative Commons licence, which the map's repository names layer by layer, and because somebody took a weekend and read it. The builder's argument is a safety one rather than a gotcha: a speed camera does its work when drivers know it is there, so publishing the locations clearly turns each one into a reason to slow down on a street where people walk.

An enforcement camera is not a view

Worth keeping the two apart. The 330 cameras on that map look at number plates and nobody outside DDOT sees their frames. The cameras we index are the other kind: public feeds that anyone can open and watch, which is a different thing entirely even when the hardware is similar.

We carry three of them inside the District. Measured on 2026-10-22, the Washington page lists all three, and each is recorded with a 150 second update interval.

• Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Tidal Basin and Lincoln Memorial is the one to open. It sits high and looks west across the Tidal Basin, with the Lincoln Memorial's colonnade in the middle distance and the Rosslyn towers behind it, Memorial Bridge off to the right. When I fetched it at 13:13 UTC on 2026-10-22 the water was flat blue and the tree line was halfway into its autumn colour. Late afternoon is the hour for it, when the sun is behind Virginia and in front of the camera.
• The Great Cats exhibit at the National Zoo covers Lion and Tiger Hill. The frame I pulled was stamped 10/22/2026 09:08:46 local, a wide shot of an empty enclosure with the morning sun coming through the trees in patches. Cats or no cats is the gamble; they tend to be out early.
• Chuck Brown Memorial Park looks down on the memorial plaza and its ring of benches off Brentwood Parkway. Mine came back shooting into low sun with a hazy lens, so it is an afternoon camera rather than a morning one.

Three public live views against 330 enforcement cameras, and 235 more units the city cannot place on a map, is a ratio I would like to even out. DC publishes plenty, so that should be straightforward, and it is the next thing on my list for the District: find the real current source for the city's roadway feeds, index them, and check them nightly like everything else. It will take a bit of digging. DDOT's traffic management page carries a nav link labelled Live Traffic Cameras, and on 2026-10-22 it still pointed at dctrafficinfo.org, a domain that today serves an online lottery portal rather than a camera viewer. Link rot catches everyone eventually. The open data under it is what survived.

Which leaves the thing I cannot solve. Of the units DDOT publishes counts for, 210 Clear Lane and 25 School Bus cameras come with no coordinates at all, so nobody can draw them, and a driver who wants to know where they are has nowhere to look. I do not see a way to place them that is not guesswork. If somebody has worked out how, I would like to hear it.