Speed Cameras Could Be Coming to East Hampton, but Not With Tickets, Just Warnings

East Hampton Village is considering purchasing portable speed cameras that could generate written warnings to the owners of speeding vehicles, even though state law does not currently allow the village to issue speeding tickets using the cameras.

The proposal is the latest attempt by the village to alleviate the surge of traffic onto residential back roads, as more and more vehicles are led off congested main thoroughfares by navigation apps calculating the fastest routes to their destination.

Village Mayor Jerry Larsen said the village and other small municipalities are going to make an appeal to the state to pass new laws allowing speed cameras to be used by small jurisdictions as a means of curtailing speeding on residential back roads.

“There needs to be legislation set up in the state that will allow us to use [this] technology within the village,” he said. “I have recruited several other mayors from the East End and we have reached out to [State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.], who is working on that legislation.”

But in the meantime, he said, the village could purchase one or two of the cameras — they cost about $30,000 each — and deploy them on back roads as a deterrent, a warning and as a data collection tool that could augment the effort to convince state lawmakers that allowing the technology to be used more punitively is warranted.

“What we can do is buy these things now and deploy them, we can sign it that speed is enforced using this technology and the company would send out a letter to the vehicle owner,” the mayor said. “If we deploy it this summer, while we’re waiting for legislation, the police department would get a lot of data.”

Village Administrator Marcos Baladron said that he had met with representatives of a company that could compile the data from the cameras and issue the written warnings to the owners of vehicles caught speeding.

The mayor said he suspected that just the signs warning of the presence of the cameras — even before tickets could be issued — would slow vehicles down.

“There will be a sign, say, when you turn onto Dunemere, warning that this technology is being used,” the mayor said to the other board members.

Speed cameras are ubiquitous in Europe, and have been credited with major reductions in fatal traffic accidents, but have been employed only sparingly in the U.S. — where there were 42,795 fatal car crashes in 2022.

The state has allowed speed cameras to be used in New York City school zones since 2013, and the mayor said the state recently expanded their allowed use citywide. Counties are also allowed to use them to regulate speed in construction zones since earlier this year — and have issued more than 100,000 tickets, nearly 42,000 of those on Long Island.

One of them went to Village Trustee Carrie Doyle, she acknowledged on Friday. “I got one of these on the LIE recently, for going 10 over, and I got it two days later — $50,” she said. She asked how much over the speed limit a ticket could be issued.

East Hampton Village Police Lieutenant Jack Bartelme told the board that officers would normally allow a cushion of 10 to 15 mph over the speed limit for a ticket to a driver. The speed cameras, he noted, if deployed would only issue warnings or tickets to the owner of the car, not a driver, so points on a license — often the more costly punishment in the long run — would not be connected to any camera-caught violations.

Trustee Chris Minardi said that although he was not eager to see more signs on village streets, he liked the idea of using the cameras as a deterrent to speeding rather than the speed humps that many residential neighborhoods are clamoring for to curb traffic.

The mayor said he’d recently received another request for speed humps from residents of Cove Hollow and Friday’s Village Board meeting was attended by several residents of LaForest Lane in Georgica, who have asked that their street be made one-way and outfitted with speed humps to relieve the deluge of speeding traffic that uses the road as a short-cut between Montauk Highway and the beach or work sites in the village’s posh estate section.

“I’m not a big fan of speed bumps because everyone wants them now, there’s a lot of upkeep, there’s problems with snow plowing, they’re loud, they’re expensive,” Minardi said. “People are not going to listen unless they get a ticket.

“We have streets like Further, Lily Pond, Cooper — they’re like race tracks,” he added.