Welcome to Better Baltimore, a new monthly series where we look at real problems in our city — and real evidence for fixes that could actually work, especially the win/win kind. Got a problem we should tackle next? Send it our way.
Five new speed cameras go live in Baltimore school zones on October 26th — Loch Raven Boulevard, Moravia Road, West Baltimore Street, McClean Boulevard, and East Northern Parkway. If ye drive past a school, ye’ve probably already gotten one of those cheerful envelopes in the mail: $40 if ye’re 12 over, all the way up to $425.
Here’s the thing nobody loves admitting: the cameras work, but everybody hates them. They’re all stick and no carrot. So what if we flipped it? What if the cameras didn’t just punish speeders — what if they rewarded good drivers?
This isn’t a fantasy. It was tested, and it worked.
The Swedish experiment
Back in 2010, a Nickelodeon producer named Kevin Richardson entered Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory” contest with a beautifully simple idea: the speed camera lottery. The camera photographs every driver. Speeders get fined as usual — but the fine money goes into a lottery pot, and drivers caught obeying the limit are entered to win it.
Stockholm tried it for three days in September 2010. Nearly 25,000 cars passed the camera. The average speed dropped from 32 km/h to 25 km/h — a 22% reduction. Five drivers won cash, including a grand prize of 20,000 Swedish krona. As the head of Sweden’s National Society for Road Safety put it at the time: you need both “whip and carrot” to get the best out of people. For decades, road safety had been all whip.
The idea even got the NPR treatment back in 2011, when gamification evangelist Gabe Zichermann explained the psychology: games aren’t about punishment, they’re about reward and pleasure. His SAPS model ranks what motivates people — status, access, power, and stuff — and cold cash isn’t even the strongest of the four. The lottery works because it turns compliance into a game worth playing.
The honest caveats
A good solutions column tells ye what didn’t work too. The Stockholm trial lasted three days — prime novelty-effect territory. Richardson himself later said the experiment probably ended because moving the setup around to keep it fresh was expensive. When the lottery was tested in five more Swedish cities in 2011, Volkswagen footed the bill rather than fine revenue. And Swedish authorities never took it further. So: promising, real, but small and short. It deserves a bigger trial, not a victory lap.
What it could look like here
Now picture those five new Baltimore school-zone cameras with a twist: every driver photographed at or under the limit gets entered into a monthly drawing. The prize pool comes from the existing fine revenue — fines the city is already collecting. No new taxes, no new bureaucracy, just a carrot bolted onto the stick.
The win/win is the whole point. Kids get safer school zones. Careful drivers get a shot at a prize for doing what they should do anyway. And the city gets better compliance without raising a single fine. Even if the novelty fades, the underlying psychology — reward the behavior ye want — doesn’t expire.
Baltimore loves an underdog story. Let’s be the American city that finally gives the speed camera lottery a real, sustained trial. The cameras are already going up. The only question is whether we use them to punish alone — or to play.
Next month: another Baltimore problem, another evidence-backed idea. Send us yours.