But more approvals could be coming in 2026. Multiple municipalities have taken steps toward meeting the many requirements they must fulfill before sending their plans to the state DOT for review.
A bill signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont in June 2023 allowed Connecticut's cities and towns to use speed and red-light cameras for the first time. DOT issued guidelines for municipalities six months later, as required by the law.
In late 2024, the small town of Washington in Litchfield County became the first municipality in the state to receive approval of its plan.
As of this month, the DOT has approved plans by 10 other municipalities. They include Middletown in central Connecticut; Beacon Falls in the Naugatuck Valley; Marlborough and Wethersfield in Hartford County, and several municipalities along the Interstate 95 corridor: Greenwich, Stamford, Fairfield, Stratford, Milford and New Haven. A plan by Hamden is under review.
The number of speed or red-light camera locations varies by plan. Marlborough and Beacon Falls each have one speed camera site, while New Haven has a total of 15 locations — 11 for red-light cameras and four for speed cameras.
Of the 11 municipalities with approved plans, at least four — Washington, Middletown, Marlborough and Greenwich — are actually issuing tickets for alleged violations.
Josh Morgan, the Connecticut DOT's director of communications, said the rollout of camera programs has been slower than some expected.
"People are surprised that out of 169 municipalities, that there are 11 approved plans," Morgan said. "I think people thought that there would be significantly more that had been approved and constructed at this point."
Among the cities and towns that are exploring or have taken steps toward the implementation of camera systems are Meriden, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Trumbull, Orange, West Haven, Westport, West Hartford and North Haven.
But in at least one municipality, residents have shut down the idea of cameras. Voters in the town of Kent near the New York border rejected a proposal to buy a pair of speed cameras as part of a referendum last year.
It remains to be seen just how many more cities and towns will implement the technology, Morgan said. It may depend, in part, on conversations between local police chiefs or traffic engineers about how camera programs are working in other municipalities.
"The technology is not new for most of the world, but I think there is a sort of wait-and-see approach," Morgan said. "Whether (it's) a mayor or first selectman, a local board of alders or a town council, they need to see what makes sense for them and their community. I think once people start seeing that driver behavior has changed, that speeds have dropped, that crashes have been reduced, I think that may open up the conversations a little bit more widely."
Washington First Selectman James Brinton said the town "tried everything available" to get drivers to slow down before it turned to cameras to capture images of cars traveling at least 10 mph over the speed limit.
"Flashing signs, outreach, increased patrols. Nothing worked," Brinton said in a statement. "This was the only option that has had a positive impact."
Since May, Washington has issued 13,211 citations totaling $669,000 from two of the three speed camera sites included in its plan.
Brinton said Washington is issuing fewer and fewer citations, "which is a good indicator of changed driver behavior."
Similarly, Middletown Mayor Gene Nocera has said that tickets from the city's speed cameras on Route 66 have "dropped off considerably." Middletown began citations at the location — one of three approved by the DOT — in July 2025 and issued more than $1 million in fines within a few months.
The 2023 law limits fines to $50 for a first offense and $75 for subsequent offenses and allows municipalities to charge up to $15 for electronic processing of payments.
State Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, the top Republican senator on the legislature's Transportation Committee, said cameras should act as deterrents to speeding and red-light running and not as cash cows for municipalities.
"It is critically important that the goal of this program was not for revenue generation," Hwang said.
The revenue generated by the fines can be used only "for the purposes of improving transportation mobility, investing in transportation infrastructure improvements or paying the costs associated with the use" of the cameras, according to the law.
"That money cannot be used to build a new soccer field," said Morgan from the state DOT. "It cannot be used to put a roof on the middle school. It really has to be for traffic safety improvements."
Morgan attributed the small number of municipalities with active camera programs to the host of requirements.
The law requires municipalities to adopt an ordinance and create a plan that's subject to a public hearing and a vote by a legislative body or Board of Selectmen. Then the plan needs the state DOT's approval.
In their plans, each town is expected to justify in writing why it wants a camera at a particular location and back it up with traffic, crash, speed or enforcement data or findings from safety studies.
After receiving DOT's approval, a city or town then needs to sign a contract with a vendor and get the cameras installed. For 30 days after the cameras start operating, the municipality can only issue warnings for alleged violations. It also must carry out a public awareness campaign, install signs ahead of the cameras and share the locations with navigation apps.
All that must come before a single ticket goes out to a car's registered owner. And a police officer, police department employee or municipal employee is supposed to review the images captured on camera before the ticket is mailed.
"There's a lot to this process, which was really intentional with how the legislation was written, so it wouldn't be: Go to bed one night and then wake up the next morning and there's 10 speed cameras in my town and no one told me about it," Morgan said.
Three years after any camera begins operating in a municipality, local officials have to reapply to DOT to continue using the devices.
"If we're seeing in the initial application that 85% of the drivers are going 55 (mph) in (an area with a 25 mph speed limit) and then that data comes back, and that has dropped to 28 in a 25 or 30 in a 25, I mean, that's a marked success," Morgan said.
"If it comes back (and) people are somehow going faster or there wasn't a significant drop, then maybe there's ways to look at it and look at other measures, like, 'Why didn't this work? Why did it work in this community but didn't work in this community?'" he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut opposed the passage of the law on speed and red-light cameras. Now, the group is "monitoring their rollout and impact closely," said Chelsea-Infinity Gonzalez, director of public policy and advocacy.
"The proliferation of more systems statewide raises important concerns about privacy, due process, and racial justice," Gonzalez said.
The ACLU of Connecticut is particularly concerned about New Haven's camera locations, she said.
"All of these are, for the most part, in census tracts that are predominantly non-white and lower income," she said. "We recognize that some of these locations may have real safety needs. But that doesn't erase the equity concerns that we have, especially when enforcement tools like the one being used generate fines, and those are concentrated in communities with fewer resources to absorb the impact."
The DOT has said that it won't approve more than two camera locations in one qualified census tract — an area with a certain concentration of poverty or lower-income households — or more than one camera in such a census tract that is a quarter of a square mile or smaller.
But Gonzalez said such safeguards don't "necessarily guarantee fair outcomes in practice."
"(If) the end result is that BIPOC communities and lower-income drivers are still bearing most of the financial and surveillance burden, it feels like the process wouldn't be working the way that it was promised, even if, technically, every single location met their criteria," she said.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said the city "spent a lot of time identifying (camera) locations with a lot of community input." He said they include sites in neighborhoods that aren't predominantly made up of Brown and Black residents, including the East Shore and East Rock, as well as downtown on "streets that have high traffic volumes from the suburbs."
"This is something that we deeply care about," Elicker said. "The city of New Haven, in everything we do, (works) hard to be equitable and thoughtful in the distribution of resources and any potential impact on fines. We don't want to do anything that disproportionately impacts one population over another."
Traffic issues and fatalities have impacted a "significant portion" of New Haven's Black and Brown population, Elicker added.
"Everyone in the city will benefit from people following the law," he said.
© 2026 Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
