Do the school-zone speed cameras sit where the crashes are, and run when they happen?
Fairfield turned on seven school-zone speed-camera corridors on May 1, 2026. This report holds those locations and their posted 20 mph hours up against 22,295 reported crashes from 2017 to 2026. The question is simple: are the cameras where crashes happen, and on when crashes happen? If you just want the raw numbers with no argument attached, the crash explorer has them.
1 · Placement: are the cameras where the crashes are?
Rank every location by how many crashes it has seen. Of the top 20, 18 sit more than 250 m from any camera corridor, and only 2 are within range. Across the whole town, just 5.2% of crashes happen within 250 m of a corridor.
| # | Highest-crash location | Crashes | Nearest camera |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BLACK ROCK | 200 | 1,270 m |
| 2 | I95 NB 18 TO 19 | 174 | 3,523 m |
| 3 | EASTON | 150 | 275 m |
| 4 | ARROWHEAD | 145 | ≤146 m · covered |
| 5 | BLACK ROCK | 136 | 2,043 m |
| 6 | BLACK ROCK | 126 | 1,509 m |
| 7 | GRASMERE | 117 | 1,967 m |
| 8 | BLACK ROCK | 114 | 1,270 m |
| 9 | KINGS HWY CUTOFF | 109 | 1,265 m |
| 10 | MERRITT SB 44 TO 42 | 108 | ≤21 m · covered |
| 11 | VILLA | 101 | 926 m |
| 12 | BLACK ROCK | 100 | 1,398 m |
“Covered” means a corridor sits within 250 m. Location labels are the value the department reports for each coordinate, so treat them as approximate.
2 · Timing: do crashes happen during the 20 mph hours?
The 20 mph limit only applies on school days, during windows that vary by road but land roughly between 7:15 and 9:30 in the morning and 1:45 and 4:15 in the afternoon. Most crashes near a corridor fall outside those windows. The chart below peaks around 2 PM, well after the afternoon zone closes, and a camera only tickets a driver going 10+ mph over 20 during the posted hours.
Of the 1,137 crashes within 250 m of a corridor, 407 (35.8%) happened on a weekday inside the posted windows. We use weekdays as a stand-in for school days, so holidays and recess are not filtered out. Windows come from the Town of Fairfield ATESD plan (OSTA No. 050-2404-01).
3 · Combined reach
Placement and timing stack on top of each other. 5.2% of crashes happen within 250 m of a corridor, and 35.8% of those land on a weekday during the posted 20 mph hours. Put the two together and only about 1.9% of Fairfield crashes happen in a place and at a time a camera is even running, before you narrow it down to the speeding drivers a camera can actually ticket. Read that as how much of the crash problem the cameras can see, not as proof of what they do or do not prevent.
| Distance from corridor | Crashes within | % of geocoded crashes | In posted hours | Combined reach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40 m | 521 | 2.4% | 162 (31.1%) | 0.74% |
| 75 m | 595 | 2.7% | 181 (30.4%) | 0.83% |
| 150 m | 946 | 4.3% | 326 (34.5%) | 1.49% |
| 250 m (used above) | 1,137 | 5.2% | 407 (35.8%) | 1.86% |
A traffic engineer would usually tie a crash to a treated segment with a tight tolerance. About 40 m covers the roadway plus a little slack for geocoding error. A wider radius is generous to the cameras, since it hands them credit for crashes on parallel roads and cross-streets they have no effect on. We use 250 m on purpose, as a conservative upper bound. Tighten it and the case only gets stronger: fewer crashes sit near the cameras, and the combined reach falls. Distance runs from the corridor centerline to each crash, measured with PostGIS ST_Distance on the geography type.
4 · What the application claimed vs. the record
To justify each camera, the town leaned on whole-road “Crash History” totals. Its own OSTA certificate, though, counts only the school-zone segment, and there the numbers nearly vanish. Across the corridors, only 13% of the crashes the application cited actually happened inside the zones the cameras cover. Mill Plain Road is the clearest case: 109 crashes cited for a camera at Riverfield Elementary, but 2 in the certificate's school zone. Our own count lines up with the town's whole-road figures, so this is an argument about what got counted, not about the data.
See the full breakdown: their numbers next to the record →5 · Explore each school zone
Pick a single corridor, or leave it on all of them, to see the crashes within 250m of that site: how many, how severe, how they trend by year, and how they line up with that road's posted 20 mph hours. Individual sites see few crashes, so a single year can swing a lot. Trust the overall shape of the bars more than any one percentage.
6 · Baseline & the test to come
The cameras went live on May 1, 2026, so nearly all of this data comes from before they existed. Treat it as a baseline rather than a scorecard. Between 2017 and 2025, before any enforcement, town-wide crashes moved -12% and crashes near the corridors moved -24%. To actually judge whether the cameras work, you need data from after they switched on and a comparison group to measure against.
| Year | Crashes | Injury | Fatal | Injury % | vs prior year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2,595 | 524 | 1 | 20.2% | — |
| 2018 | 2,629 | 521 | 1 | 19.8% | +1% |
| 2019 | 2,596 | 558 | 3 | 21.5% | -1% |
| 2020 | 1,646 | 354 | 2 | 21.5% | -37% |
| 2021 | 2,160 | 430 | 2 | 19.9% | +31% |
| 2022 | 2,521 | 486 | 1 | 19.3% | +17% |
| 2023 | 2,446 | 544 | 2 | 22.2% | -3% |
| 2024 | 2,271 | 453 | 0 | 19.9% | -7% |
| 2025 | 2,290 | 472 | 1 | 20.6% | +1% |
| 2026 (YTD) | 1,141 | 199 | 1 | 17.4% | — |
| Year | Crashes | vs prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 137 | — |
| 2018 | 146 | +7% |
| 2019 | 138 | -5% |
| 2020 | 86 | -38% |
| 2021 | 111 | +29% |
| 2022 | 151 | +36% |
| 2023 | 129 | -15% |
| 2024 | 97 | -25% |
| 2025 | 104 | +7% |
| 2026 (YTD) | 38 | — |
Yearly totals are too blunt to isolate a May 1 start date, so the real test has to run month by month. Only a handful of post-activation months exist so far, and these bars are town-wide rather than corridor-specific, so treat the gold bars as context rather than a result. We have committed to the method in advance: once enough months build up after activation, we will publish a before-and-after comparison (empirical-Bayes with a control group) built on this same open dataset. Subscribe if you want the answer when it lands.
Get the before/after verdict
Fanal keeps an open, reproducible record of Fairfield crashes and enforcement. Subscribe and we'll send the post-activation evaluation and any new towns we add. Prefer to dig through the numbers yourself? The crash explorer has them.
Method & limitations
Source: the Fairfield Police Department Interactive Crime & Statistical Dashboard (2017–2026), pulled at the incident level from the dashboard's query API. It logs every incident police respond to, so the totals include minor and private-property collisions that never reach the state. Every crash carries its own date and time, so both placement and timing rest on real per-incident data. Placement and timing use the 21,882 crashes that carry coordinates. Proximity uses PostGIS ST_DWithin on the geography type with a 250 m buffer around plan-derived corridor centerlines, and nearest-camera distance uses ST_Distance. These are counts rather than rates, with no adjustment for traffic volume. Corridor geometry is approximate, since the town publishes roads and cross-streets instead of GPS pins. Use the source toggle at the top to compare both datasets.