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 12,199 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, 19 sit more than 250 m from any camera corridor, and only 1 is within range. Across the whole town, just 4.2% of crashes happen within 250 m of a corridor.
| # | Highest-crash location | Crashes | Nearest camera |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1-S | 38 | 1,505 m |
| 2 | 732-N | 29 | 1,237 m |
| 3 | 135-N | 29 | 871 m |
| 4 | 279 STILLSON ROAD | 28 | 1,398 m |
| 5 | BLACK ROCK TNPK | 19 | 2,070 m |
| 6 | 1-N | 19 | 593 m |
| 7 | GREENFIELD ST | 16 | 939 m |
| 8 | 1-N | 13 | 1,488 m |
| 9 | 58-N | 12 | 1,599 m |
| 10 | TUNXIS HILL RD | 12 | 952 m |
| 11 | 58-N | 12 | 954 m |
| 12 | 59-S | 12 | 1,143 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 510 crashes within 250 m of a corridor, 159 (31.2%) 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. 4.2% of crashes happen within 250 m of a corridor, and 31.2% of those land on a weekday during the posted 20 mph hours. Put the two together and only about 1.3% 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 | 339 | 2.8% | 110 (32.4%) | 0.9% |
| 75 m | 365 | 3% | 114 (31.2%) | 0.93% |
| 150 m | 410 | 3.4% | 127 (31%) | 1.04% |
| 250 m (used above) | 510 | 4.2% | 159 (31.2%) | 1.3% |
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 -31% and crashes near the corridors moved -38%. 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 | 1,681 | 345 | 1 | 20.5% | — |
| 2018 | 1,551 | 322 | 1 | 20.8% | -8% |
| 2019 | 1,520 | 366 | 1 | 24.1% | -2% |
| 2020 | 942 | 207 | 1 | 22.0% | -38% |
| 2021 | 1,221 | 287 | 1 | 23.5% | +30% |
| 2022 | 1,319 | 318 | 1 | 24.1% | +8% |
| 2023 | 1,284 | 323 | 3 | 25.2% | -3% |
| 2024 | 1,203 | 279 | 0 | 23.2% | -6% |
| 2025 | 1,155 | 304 | 2 | 26.3% | -4% |
| 2026 (YTD) | 323 | 131 | 0 | 40.6% | — |
| Year | Crashes | vs prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 76 | — |
| 2018 | 66 | -13% |
| 2019 | 62 | -6% |
| 2020 | 34 | -45% |
| 2021 | 43 | +26% |
| 2022 | 50 | +16% |
| 2023 | 72 | +44% |
| 2024 | 51 | -29% |
| 2025 | 47 | -8% |
| 2026 (YTD) | 9 | — |
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 Connecticut Crash Data Repository (CTCDR / UConn), the state's official MMUCC crash record (2017–2026). It counts only state-reportable crashes on public surface streets; we exclude I-95, the Merritt, and Route 15 so the figures stay comparable to the local-road focus of the cameras. Recent months lag as reports are filed, so 2026 reads low. Every crash carries its own date and time, so both placement and timing rest on real per-incident data. Placement and timing use the 12,199 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.