I’m a part of a team that is taking public data for the City of Albany, analyzing it, and turning the analysis into stories that inform our community. We publish this analysis and stories on the website, Albany Data Stories. These data-driven stories address housing, budgets, crime, pedestrian safety and more.
We are speaking about public data to WAMC’s listeners because we believe that public data promotes citizen engagement and an appreciation of our government, improving transparency and accountability.
Our objective is to provide examples of how citizen-led public data research works - how is it possible to take public data and turn it into insight that informs citizens and impacts policy? Let’s walk through an example of our public data analysis
If you live in or have driven through the City of Albany you are aware of the City’s school zone speed camera system that issues $50 citations to cars going 31 mph or higher through school zones. The City engaged a vendor to implement the speed camera system and the City and the vendor split the citation revenue. Two-thirds of all citations are sent to addresses outside of the City of Albany since the system went online in October 2024, which reflects a large commuter population that travels into the City for work, school and services.
The City of Albany budgeted $6 million of net revenue in 2025 for the speed camera program. Our team looked at the initial press releases touting the revenue generation, and our back-of-the-napkin analysis suggested that the City would fall short of the revenue goal. In February 2025 we requested access to the citation data - a list of all citations and the location where they were issued, the date and time of the citation, and the cited speed; we received a list of 126,000 citations issued over a 7-month period.
We focused our analysis solely on the revenue generation of the program; we weren’t questioning the pedestrian safety benefits of the program. We found three things from analyzing the citation data:
- Firstly, when a camera system goes online there is an immediate spike in the number of citations which declines materially over time. Drivers are surprised by the speed cameras, however they quickly begin to abide by the speed limit or they change their travel path to avoid cameras.
- Secondly, between ¼ to ⅓ of citations do not get paid. The consequences of not paying citations is low.
- Lastly, within the City of Albany, citations can be considered a regressive tax. We found that 40% of citations go to City residents who live in lower socioeconomic ZIP codes.
Our biggest discovery was when we used the citation data to analyze the 2025 budgeted revenue of $6 million. We used the data to project that 2025 revenue would generate between $2 million and $3 million. We came to all of these conclusions from analyzing a single dataset obtained through Freedom of Information Law.
We didn’t stop there. We FOILed a copy of the agreement between the City and the speed camera vendor. The vendor agreement states that the City keeps $17 of revenue from every $50 citation. We suspected that the revenue split is unfavorable to the City. The best way to validate that is to look at other cities, so we found a list of the vendor’s other customers - Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Longmont Colorado and more - and we FOILed those cities for copies of their vendor agreements. While Albany keeps 34% of the revenue from citations, every other City we analyzed keeps 60% or more of citation revenue. The City’s poor agreement will cost the City $10 million of unrealized revenue over a 5-year period.
To sum up - we were concerned about the operations of a City initiative and its underlying economics; we used data and analysis to shed light on the program. How has the City responded? In 2026 the City budgeted $4 million of revenue from the speed camera program, a figure that is likely an overreach based on the data.
When we champion citizens obtaining and analyzing public data from local governments we know that not every dataset and every analysis is going to provide surprises. What we do know is that receiving, understanding and analyzing a city’s data will make you a more informed citizen.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
