Last year brought a reprieve for the city’s ticket-weary drivers.
Red-light cameras snagged 615,726 motorists blowing through intersections between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 of 2012, down from 880,922 in all of 2011, according to data obtained by The Post.
If altered to reflect a projected 12-month total, the number of red-light violations doled out last year would be 671,701 — an eye-popping drop of 23.7 percent from the previous year.
The city Department of Finance does not yet have December’s figures.
Mayor Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna attributed the decline to more cautious driving, especially after a record 1 million red-light-camera tickets were issued in 2010.
The city has 170 cameras at 150 intersections.
“That is the whole point — enforce the rules to get more people to comply, and it’s working,” La Vorgna said.
The same applies, he said, to the dip in parking tickets.
In 2011, the city slapped drivers with more than 8.8 million parking tickets, compared with nearly 7.9 million through Nov. 30 last year. When projected to a 12-month figure, the number of parking tickets would be about 8.5 million — a roughly 3 percent decline.
“In a perfect world, we would issue zero tickets and no one would miss out on a space due to someone else parking illegally, parking in front of businesses would always have turnover and street cleaning would never be impacted by illegally parked cars,” La Vorgna said.
Suspension of alternate-side parking and meter rules in the weeks after Hurricane Sandy also contributed to the decrease, officials said.
The number of parking summonses has been dropping since 2009, despite cries from drivers and politicians who say the city’s ticket agents are zealots who treat violations as a cash cow.
The city issued just shy of 10 million parking tickets in 2009, compared with nearly 9.3 million in 2010.
The Post reported yesterday that drivers in lower Manhattan were spared heavy fines because ticket agents were reassigned in Sandy’s aftermath. Parking-ticket watchdog Glen Bolofsky said he was seeing roughly 30 tickets a week in the area, compared with more than 1,000 pre-Sandy.