Clark Mercer, who was chief of staff to former Virginia governor Ralph Northam, said he was alerted to the problem of cross-border ticket enforcement only when leaving that office in 2022.

“I said, ‘We can’t effectuate anything; we’re literally packing up. I wish I had known about this earlier,’” Mercer recalled. He is now in charge of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional planning group, and has been pushing for action.

Mercer said he learned that one way drivers evaded responsibility for camera tickets was by getting tags from Virginia, which allows non residents to register vehicles there: About 14,000 D.C. drivers have Virginia tags. More than half of the drivers being sued by Schwalb’s office have a collection of both Maryland and Virginia license plates.

Out-of-state tags also are an issue in Baltimore. An analysis found that six of the 10 vehicles with the most tickets for speeding in school zones had Virginia tags. About 100,000 Maryland drivers have Virginia tags, data reviewed by The Post shows. Along with ticket enforcement legislation, Maryland lawmakers are working to make it easier to flag and penalize residents with out-of-state tags.

Both Maryland and Virginia have an incentive to cooperate with D.C. as they expand their own camera enforcement programs.

“The stars are starting to align to get this done,” Mercer said. “We’re moving in a very positive direction.”

Cars can also be stolen or the tags forged. Tanyeka Brown of Temple Hills, Maryland, said her Nissan Maxima was caught repeatedly on traffic cameras on Bladensburg Road. The vehicle was stolen from outside her house in December, she said, and after that “I was getting tickets every day, at least 10 of them.” Brown said her car was found in a tow lot last March, “damaged to the point that I couldn’t even drive it.”

The District now has a law automatically dismissing tickets when someone reports a vehicle as stolen so that they don’t have to challenge each ticket in court, but it applies only to D.C. residents. Non-D. C. residents must still contest those violations before a judge.

For now, D.C. can seize out-of-state vehicles only if they are parked on the street in the city. That doesn’t always happen. The Maryland Audi got a parking ticket in February in Northeast Washington but wasn’t towed.

The Department of Public Works has said that 2,000 vehicles were impounded last year, including 556 vehicles with more than $2,000 owed, but that to tow more requires more staff and equipment. Advocates say the real problem is a lack of urgency.

“A 4,000-pound machine driven repeatedly at reckless speed by someone who has shown that they will not stop is absolutely no different from someone with an AK-47,” Karthik Balasubramanian of the group D.C. Families for Safe Streets said at a recent public hearing. “If there was such a person who was roaming the District with an AK-47 randomly shooting … we would mobilize all available resources to separate that person from their weapon and let them get the help that they need. Why are we not doing the same with the dangerous drivers who are abusing their own weapons?”

The District still has by far the most automated enforcement in the region: About 3.3 million camera tickets were issued in 2025, according to city data.

The number of tickets issued each year has steadily climbed, after dropping at the start of the covid pandemic. Starting in 2023, more than $150 million in speeding tickets have been issued each year, with 2025 hitting more than $257 million, the most since before the pandemic.

Studies have found that traffic cameras can reduce crashes significantly. But “the cameras only go so far for the most egregious drivers,” said Sharon Kershbaum, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation Director. “And those are the same ones who are going to be causing the fatal crash.”

After rising for years, traffic fatalities fell dramatically last year, from 52 in 2024 to 25, according to data from D.C. police. But they remain about as high as they were a decade ago, when Bowser made a commitment to end traffic deaths by 2025. There have been 12 deaths on city roads so far this year.

Meanwhile, some House Republicans have threatened to eliminate D.C.’s speed-camera program, arguing it is unfair to drivers. The White House has indicated it might support such a GOP proposal.