Chicago’s speed cameras recorded 1,047,944 violations in the first five months of 2026, up 38% from the same months last year. Chicagoans did not simply forget how to drive. At cameras that were already ticketing last year, violations fell 16.4%. The increase came from the roughly 50 cameras the city switched on since mid-2025, which recorded 412,329 violations on their own. Five of the ten busiest cameras in the city are among them. We summed the city’s daily per-camera data for every location. The leaderboard is below, led by a camera that has recorded 166,666 violations in its first year of operation.
How we calculated the camera counts
The city publishes daily violation counts for every speed camera and red-light camera. We summed January 1 through May 31 for 2026 and 2025 at every location: 213 speed-camera addresses and 151 red-light intersections. One definition matters: these are violations recorded by the cameras. Not every recorded violation becomes a mailed, paid ticket. Reviews, dismissals, and appeals thin the count. Read these figures as how often each camera catches someone, not as a receipts ledger.
New speed cameras lead the violation totals
Last year the city added roughly 50 speed cameras, about a 30% expansion. The Johnson administration budgeted the expansion with revenue earmarked for the 2025 budget, as the Sun-Times reported when tickets began surging. Our numbers show what that expansion looks like a year on. The new hardware went straight to the top of the leaderboard, while violations at the pre-existing fleet dropped 16.4%. The pattern is consistent with drivers learning where the long-standing cameras are, though the entries can’t prove why. The camera at 3358 S. Ashland recorded its first violation on June 15, 2025, and has logged 166,666 since. That includes 51,185 in January–May of this year, roughly 340 per day, the most of any camera in Chicago. 5857 N. Broadway (first ticket June 1, 2025) is second at 38,496.
Chart: KCM Desk computation from City of Chicago speed-camera violation data. Hover any bar for details.
The concentration is striking: the top ten cameras, ten addresses out of 213, account for 28% of every speed violation recorded in the city this year. If you drive past 3358 S. Ashland, 5857 N. Broadway, or 10540 S. Western regularly, you are passing the machines doing much of Chicago’s ticketing.
Speed-camera counts by street
Every speed camera in the city is grouped by the street it watches. Choose a street you drive on. The counts are January through May 2026, with last year’s same-month figure for comparison. Summed across its cameras, Western Avenue is the most-ticketing street in Chicago.
Violations recorded, not tickets paid; “began 2025/26” marks cameras with no activity in early 2025. Street totals sum all cameras on that street.
Speed-camera fine schedule and revenue bounds
The fine schedule, per the city, is $35 for 6–10 mph over the limit and $100 for 11 mph or more. The violation data doesn’t split by speed tier, so we won’t pretend to compute revenue. The arithmetic bounds are straightforward: if every one of the Ashland camera’s 51,185 early-2026 violations became a paid ticket, that single pole would represent between $1.8 million and $5.1 million in five months. The real figure is lower because of warnings for first-time offenders, dismissals, and unpaid tickets. The city’s own budget projection for all 50 new cameras was $11.4 million a year. That number is worth remembering when you hear the program described purely as a safety measure. The debate belongs to the aldermen.
Red-light camera violations changed little
Red-light violations barely moved year over year: 207,044 versus 203,913, up 1.5%. That makes sense because the fleet didn’t expand. The perennial leader is the Lake Shore Drive and Belmont camera, up 34% to 11,214 violations in five months. Every red-light violation is a flat $100.
| Red-light camera intersection | Jan–May 2026 | Jan–May 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lake Shore Dr And Belmont | 11,214 | 8,371 | +34% |
| Cicero And I55 | 8,006 | 7,553 | +6% |
| Stony Island/Cornell And 67Th | 6,498 | 5,246 | +24% |
| Wentworth And Garfield | 5,375 | 6,308 | -15% |
| 99Th And Halsted | 5,362 | 4,848 | +11% |
| Lake And Upper Wacker | 4,445 | 2,381 | +87% |
Speed-camera rules for Chicago drivers
Chicago issues tickets at 6 mph over, a threshold that surprises drivers from almost anywhere else. It is the single most useful thing to know before your first month of driving in the city. Cameras sit in marked “Safety Zones” near schools and parks, new cameras get a 30-day warning period before fines start, and the city posts locations on its website. The pattern in our numbers is consistent: wide, fast-feeling arterials such as Ashland, Western, Archer, and Cicero are where the counters spin.
Sources and data methodology
- City of Chicago Data Portal: Speed Camera Violations (through June 3, 2026) and Red-Light Camera Violations (through July 3, 2026), pulled July 17, 2026. Method: sum of daily violations per location, Jan 1–May 31, 2026 vs. 2025; first-ticket dates from each camera’s full history.
- Block Club Chicago: the 2025 camera expansion; Chicago Sun-Times: ticket surge and driver reaction (September 2025)
- City of Chicago: Safety Zone program, fine schedule, camera locations
Computed by KCM Desk from the files above as of July 17, 2026. The datasets update regularly; rankings can shift as new cameras finish warning periods. Want the count for a camera near you? Ask — we have all 364.