Speed-Camera Dispute Points to Larger Planning Issue

Elmwood Place’s town council installed speed cameras operated by the company Optotraffic to slow down some of the 18,000 commuters traveling through the village each day. The program’s opponents, who claim the town council and Optotraffic are just out to make money, waged a social media campaign and eventually filed a class-action lawsuit against Elmwood Place. This March, a county judge forced the town council to take the speed cameras down.

What is a town like Elmwood Place to do, faced with safety concerns and a decrease in local business revenue thanks to speeding commuters? Sarah Goodyear suggests that a wholesale re-planning of the village’s business district may be in order. After all, while pedestrian-friendly planning doesn’t come cheap, neither do lawsuits. “What we have to ask ourselves is what kind of places we want to pay for with the money we have,” she writes.