The three Tacoma avenues getting speed cameras are already on camera
At 06:11 Pacific this morning the camera on I-5 at Portland Avenue showed four empty northbound lanes running under the overpass, the deck lit flat orange, the far shoulder still dark. WSDOT burns the date and the minute into the corner of the frame, so you can tell it is this morning and not a file photo. That camera sits at milepost 134.8, looking down on the freeway where Portland Avenue crosses it.
Portland Avenue is one of three Tacoma streets due a speed enforcement camera in January, and it is the one you can already watch.
What two cameras counted in four weeks
Tacoma switched on its first two automated speed cameras on 14 September 2026: one on Norpoint Way NE watching the uphill direction, one on SR 509 at Marine View Drive watching southbound, both with a one-month warning period before any money changed hands (city announcement, 2026). Between 14 September and 11 October the pair recorded about 400,000 speeding detections out of roughly 515,000 vehicle passes, which is around 77% of everything that went by a posted 40 mph (city figures reported by The News Tribune). Most of it was mild. Between 55 and 60% of the detections were under 10 mph over the limit, 10 to 12% were more than 10 over, and more than 180 were at 70 mph or faster in a 40 zone.
A detection is not a driver, and that matters before anyone quotes the 77% as three in four Tacomans. Someone who commutes that way twice a day is counted twice a day, on both sides of the fraction. It is a share of trips, and the 400,000 and the 515,000 in that same city data are counted the same way.
Two hundred a day out of four hundred thousand
The warning period ended on 14 October and the city started mailing $145 civil infractions. It cannot mail 400,000 of them. Processing is capped at 100 citations per camera per day, 200 across the two, drawn at random from the violations that clear a speed threshold the city will not publish, weighted toward the faster ones (KOMO, 19 October 2026). Divide the reported 400,000 detections over those 28 days and you get roughly 14,300 a day, of which 200 are ticketed: about one in seventy, if the rate holds.
So the ticket is not the instrument here. The city reports speeding down 12% at the Norpoint Way camera and 20% at Marine View Drive (KOMO, 19 October 2026), and average speeds in the last warning week down from 44.1 and 44.4 mph to 43.1 and 43.7, which happened while the cameras were still issuing warnings and nobody had been fined at all. That is deterrence doing the work, and deterrence only runs on what drivers believe is there.
Which is why I personally think the confidential threshold is the wrong call. A driver who knows the camera exists but cannot tell whether 44 in a 40 counts will guess, and half of them will guess generously - the city's own 55 to 60% figure for detections under 10 mph over is roughly the shape of that guess. Publish the number and the guessing stops. The usual objection is that drivers would then sit at one under it, which is, as far as I can tell, the entire point. I would like to be wrong here, though: is there a city that published its threshold and measured what happened?
The Tacoma cameras anyone can open
Neither enforcement camera puts out a frame the public can look at, and nor should it; a camera that reads plates to write tickets is a different machine to a camera that shows you the road. The roads themselves are well covered. The Tacoma page showed 48 live cameras when I loaded it at 13:16 UTC today, nearly all of them WSDOT's. Six worth the click, all as they stood at 06:11 Pacific this morning:
- SR 16 at Sprague Avenue looks northeast along the viaduct as it curves away, a bridge span in the left foreground and the city lights strung out behind it. South Sprague is one of the January three. Best at dusk, when the deck lights come up before the sky goes.
- I-5 at Pacific Avenue is the darkest of the set before sunrise, a curving offramp on the right and a bar of headlight glare across the top of the frame. Pacific Avenue is the second of the January three.
- I-5 at Portland Avenue, the third, from under the overpass, which makes it the one camera here that is useful in heavy rain.
- SR 509 at the SB SR 167 flyover watches the ramp swing right past a chevron board with the tideflats lit up beyond it. Same state route as the Marine View Drive enforcement camera, a few miles down.
- Point Defiance ferry holding had its lanes empty, one car parked by the booth and the signal red. Open it forty minutes before a Tahlequah sailing and it will tell you whether to hurry.
- Tacoma Narrows Bridge, eastbound walkway at tower 11 gives you the deck and the walkway railing in one frame, with a single car smeared across the lanes by the exposure. Worth an afternoon look in clear weather for the Olympics behind the cables.
They refresh about once a minute. I watched the Last-Modified header on WSDOT's published Sprague Avenue frame today and it moved at 13:12:31, 13:13:28 and 13:14:27 UTC, so 57 and 59 seconds apart. Nothing on Norpoint Way itself is public, so the nearest thing to the first enforcement camera is the SR 509 view above.
The six coming in January
Six more speed cameras are due in phases from January 2027, two each on South Sprague Avenue, Pacific Avenue and Portland Avenue, one per direction (city announcement, above). All three streets already have a WSDOT camera where they meet a highway, which is the trio linked above. We will keep watching those three corridors and list whatever public traffic cameras the city or the state publishes along them; we carry agency traffic cameras, not enforcement feeds and not plate readers, and that line does not move.
The number I want next is the six-month one. Tacoma's 12% and 20% were measured in the weeks when the cameras were only sending warnings, and the honest test is whether they hold once the mailings have been landing for a season, or whether the one-in-seventy odds get around. I will come back to it when the city publishes.