He has pushed the city to try everything in his ward — stop signs, speed humps, traffic circles — but none have proven effective.
In search of more solutions, the city council unanimously approved a program Wednesday to install traffic light cameras that would record vehicles running red lights or speeding through intersections. The city will use that data to determine whether warning signs and increased police presence can meaningfully change driver behavior.
The data collected won't be stored or shared with third parties, and no license plate information will be gathered, the city said.
"This is really just a data collecting process, which is something the city does on a pretty regular basis with regards to when one of our constituents calls and asks for a stop sign or a speed hump," Knudsen said. "I knew from the beginning this would be a hard topic to talk about ... nobody wants to be Big Brother; nobody wants to collect data; nobody wants that information. We just want safer drivers, and that really is it."
The city awarded a contract up to $402,080 to Henderson-based transportation consulting agency Ludian. Its bid included a one-year rental of traffic cameras and its analytics platform.
The pilot traffic camera program, he said, will allow the city to record red-light running and speeding violations at "some of our most critical intersections," helping officials better understand traffic trends and develop targeted solutions. The program also will give the city a chance to observe how drivers respond to warning signage posted ahead of those intersections, he said.
The city selected 12 sites with high rates of traffic-related injuries and identified several hotspots of "vulnerable road users," including school and construction zones, for the cameras.
Tentative intersections include Las Vegas and Charleston boulevards, Vegas Drive and Decatur Boulevard, and Torrey Pines Drive and Hyde Avenue.
City officials did not say when the pilot program would launch.
A concern for some residents
In Southern Nevada, public areas, freeways and surface streets are monitored by a network of cameras overlapping local municipalities, regional bodies and state agencies. The vast majority of these cameras are dedicated to real-time traffic management, incident response and public safety.
The RTC, for instance, has traffic cameras placed throughout the Las Vegas Valley to monitor arterial streets and freeways. The Nevada Department of Transportation has cameras that, in conjunction with the RTC network, offer live feeds of highways and freeways that are accessible to the public.
Metro Police employ an arsenal of technology, including live public safety cameras throughout the Strip and downtown.
But state law generally prohibits the use of automated enforcement systems to issue traffic citations. One exception: A 2025 state law allows cameras to be mounted on school buses to catch motorists who pass them when the buses are displaying their red flashing lights.
The use of all of the technology raises some concerns.
Flock Safety manufactures and operates security technology including artificial intelligence-powered license plate recognition cameras, gunfire locator systems and CCTV cameras. Since the company's founding in 2017, its fixed cameras have been installed in more than 4,000 cities through contracts with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 42 states. Las Vegas is among them.
Metro Police operate hundreds of Flock automated license plate reader cameras, according to DeFlock.me, a free, open-source, community-driven mapping platform dedicated to uncovering and tracking the spread of mass surveillance infrastructure.
Flock cameras scan license plates and collect other identifying information — a vehicle's make, model and color. Photographs captured by Flock cameras are stored in a searchable database available to law enforcement. Using the national network of information, police can query to track the location of specific vehicles — even beyond their jurisdiction, according to NPR.
"I do not want any of our taxpayer money for the Flock surveillance," resident Armando Garcia said at Wednesday's Las Vegas City Council meeting. "I would recommend not having any of this funded, and even if it's given as a donation or a gift by other people, the city council, the Metropolitan Police Department should not be using these Flock devices. It is also a violation of our privacy as citizens."
The city's pilot program does not involve Flock, Cunningham stressed.
The solar-powered radar and camera technology in the city's pilot program will monitor four to six lanes at once and collect only three details: speed, instances of red-light running and what type of vehicle committed the violation.
Under the contract, no images of the driver, passengers or rear windshield will be captured. Biometric identification such as facial recognition is "expressly prohibited," Cunningham said.
Data will be accessible only to program administrators, and the company will be required to wipe its system of any collected data once the 12-month pilot concludes.
Knudsen said he has worked with city employees on this contract for at least six months and even presented it to the Nevada Legislature's Joint Infrastructure Committee a day before it passed in the council chambers.
"There's no data sharing between us and Metro other than what the results of that study would look like, which is how many people have gone through a red light, how many people are speeding through red lights," Knudsen said.
'Egregious' driving a problem in Las Vegas
Councilwoman Olivia Diaz says she is "seeing more and more" drivers run red lights while taking her 15-year-old to and from school. Each time, it "just makes me more and more upset to see that people don't care about their own neighbors," she said.
Diaz supported the pilot program, she said, because "speed kills," and the city needs to be equipped with information that can help the council make necessary changes to further public safety.
She also believes the pilot program could show whether traffic camera technology mitigates the problem, which would prevent the city from making "substantial investments" down the road on something with little results.
Mayor Shelley Berkley added that she also has witnessed some "egregious" driving throughout the city. She told council members that constituent concern about bad driving in Southern Nevada has reached a fever pitch in her orbit.
In 2025, there were 361 fatal crashes and 381 deaths throughout the state, according to the Nevada Department of Public Safety's Office of Traffic Safety. The numbers were down about 9% from the 420 deaths in 2024. Over the past decade, Nevada has recorded an average of about 361 traffic-related fatalities and more than 1,000 serious injuries annually.
Councilwoman Shondra Summers-Armstrong said she understood the concerns of community members in her ward — which has a large Black population — who fear overpolicing.
A study published in 2023 tracking the movements of nearly 10,000 officers across 21 major U.S. cities found that police spent considerably more time in Black neighborhoods than in other areas with similar socioeconomic demographics and crime-driven demand for policing.
Summers-Armstrong said she raised these concerns with Knudsen and others involved in drafting the contract, working to ensure residents would be less at risk of having their data unknowingly stored or shared.
But the solutions lie elsewhere as well, she stressed.
Summers-Armstrong pointed out that high schools no longer mandate driver training, which could leave some students with fewer resources to learn the rules of the road.
Some high schools in the Clark County School District offer driver education courses, but the availability varies by campus, and few campuses provide behind-the-wheel training. Driver training from an independent school licensed by the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles can cost more than $100 an hour depending on the company and courses.
Without that training or supervision, students instead are watching bad drivers and repeating that same behavior without correction.
She also pushed the city for more intentional designs to make streets safer for both pedestrians and vehicle users.
"I agree with my colleague, Councilman Knudsen, that we are struggling mightily with traffic deaths; we are struggling with injury; we are struggling with speeding," Summers-Armstrong said. "I think that these things that Councilman Knudsen has talked about that the city has done matter, but the other part of this is our roads. Our streets resemble our freeways ... I think that we have to become intentional about how we design our streets, and I think that will be the next thing that we're going to have to seriously consider."
© 2026 the Las Vegas Sun (Las Vegas, Nev.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
