A quarter-million drivers have already been caught. Colorado’s expanding network of average-speed cameras tagged 262,000 motorists in Denver and along Interstate 25, and as of April 2, the net just got wider with a new enforcement zone on I-25 north of the city.
Forget tapping the brakes when your phone chirps. These aren’t the single-point speed cameras that Waze and Google Maps have trained American drivers to game for decades. Colorado’s automated vehicle identification systems, known as AVIS, use multiple cameras spread across a stretch of road to calculate your average speed between them.
Drive 10 mph or more over the limit across that distance, and a $75 ticket lands in the vehicle owner’s mailbox. No points on your license. No officer involved. No debate about who was behind the wheel — the ticket goes to whoever’s name is on the registration.
The legal foundation was laid in 2023, when Colorado legislators authorized law enforcement to deploy AVIS statewide. Cameras went up first along construction zones and high-risk corridors. Warnings came before citations. That grace period is over.
The newest zone, a construction stretch of I-25 north of Denver, flipped to live enforcement on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed it, but it’s local and state police writing the tickets. Denver has been running its own speed-camera program in parallel, and the 262,000 detections reported by the Denver Post suggest the appetite for automated enforcement is anything but modest.
The math-based approach is what separates this from every speed trap Americans have learned to dodge. A single radar gun or camera can be spotted, flagged in a crowdsourced app, and beaten with a lift off the throttle. Average-speed systems erase that loophole entirely.
Your speed over the full measured distance is what counts. Slow down near one camera and you’d better stay slow until you pass the next, which could be miles away. In practical terms, you’d have to drive the speed limit. Imagine that.
It’s a model already common in Europe, the UK, and Australia, where point-to-point enforcement has been running for years. Colorado is the American proving ground, and if the ticket revenue and crash-reduction data look anything like what overseas programs have delivered, other states will follow. The technology is cheap relative to staffing highway patrol officers around the clock, and it doesn’t call in sick.
There’s a surveillance dimension here that deserves a clear-eyed look. These cameras capture plate data, timestamps, and location — a running log of vehicle movements across public roads. The 2023 law authorized their use for speeding. Future legislatures could authorize them for much more.
Once the infrastructure exists, expanding its purpose is a policy change, not a technology problem.
For now, the immediate reality is straightforward: Colorado has built a speed enforcement system that doesn’t blink, doesn’t need a lunch break, and can’t be outsmarted by a $4.99 app subscription. The $75 fine is modest. The zero-point penalty is lenient. The message is not.
The state is telling drivers it can watch them continuously, over distance, and act on what it sees. The 262,000 drivers already flagged suggest plenty of people haven’t gotten that message yet. They will.
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