• Ohio cameras still generate millions despite anti-profit laws.
  • School-zone exemptions keep automated fines profitable.
  • Some towns cash in while others barely issue tickets.

Ohio lawmakers worked hard to strip the profit motive out of automated ticketing to give drivers a fair ride, but plenty of towns are still quietly cashing in. New filings show that 15 Ohio communities are running traffic cameras and pulling in millions of dollars every year, even though the law is meant to make doing so financially pointless.

For every dollar a city earns from camera fines, the state claws back a dollar from its Local Government Fund allocation. In theory, that should make traffic cameras a zero-sum game.

School Zones Are a Goldmine

In practice, many towns keep them anyway. The one big loophole is fixed cameras in school zones, which are exempt from the penalty and have become prime real estate for automated enforcement.

Records obtained by Cleveland reveal just how uneven the camera economy is. At the top of the leaderboard sits Newburgh Heights, a tiny village with just two cameras on Harvard Road. Those two poles generated a staggering $4.3 million in a single year.

Related: What’s Your Secret To Dodging Speed Traps?

East Cleveland followed with about $2.9 million from a dozen locations, while Dayton pulled in $2.4 million from 15 sites across the city.

One State Just Can’t Stop Its Traffic Cameras Printing Money
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Then there’s Linndale, a village of roughly 100 people that somehow wrung nearly $2.3 million from one camera on Memphis Road. Parma only sites cameras in school zones, but still brought in more than $1.5 million, while Parma Heights’ five cameras also located near schools raised $841,000.

With that kind of money-printing ability it’s a surprise Ohio’s cameras aren’t advertising their own $997 ‘just copy me!’ course on Instagram to teach other boxes on poles how to up their revenue.

But not every town struck gold. Some cameras barely paid for their own electricity. Higginsport, population 215, collected about $87,000, and Liverpool Township managed just $370 from two tickets, earning the dubious honor of Ohio’s least profitable speed trap. Somewhere, a printer sat idle all year, while others were working overtime.