Though traffic fatalities have decreased by 30 percent in New York City in the past 10 years, speeding remains the number one cause of collisions throughout the city. In 2012, speeding caused the greatest number of traffic deaths in New York City, taking the lives of more New Yorkers than drunk driving and distracted driving combined.
As a result, New York City police officers have increased the amount of tickets they issue throughout the year for speeding by as much as 25 percent so far in 2013. Recently, the NYPD wrote a total of 736 tickets during a citywide speeding enforcement crackdown during the second weekend of October alone.
Periodic ticketing blitzes and the overall increase in speeding tickets in 2013 may also be due in part to criticism of NYPD ticketing practices over the past few years. Law enforcement has been typically been lax with respect to speeding violations in the city, with for example, 88% of drivers in Brooklyn getting away with speeding according to one report.
In part because of a lack of enough officers on the road, ticketing is far more common for violations other than speeding in the city. For instance, the NYPD issued more tickets for riding a bike on a sidewalk than for speeding on surface streets in New York City last year, issuing around 25,000 citations for sidewalk riding as opposed to only 19,119 speeding tickets. With criticism of the NYPD’s recent failure to ticket any speeding drivers in two precincts in the city throughout the month of September, the 25 percent increase is sure to rise as ticketing blitzes for speeding become more common and enforcement more strict.
(Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/speed-demons-running-wild-brooklyn-article-1.1501982#ixzz2jdNWwlx7
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/10/16/police-issued-more-than-700-tickets-in-weekend-speeding-crackdown/
http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/07/09/nypd-issues-more-tickets-for-sidewalk-riding-than-speeding-on-local-streets)