Yeah they said they did here too (after multiple years of there being a "penalty"). Although watching drivers you'd never know it. What seems to happen is people rack up tickets and never pay them and only ever get any penalty if they get pulled over for something else. And traffic enforcement here is abysmal so most of it is effectively almost not enforced. So enraging.

And I'm only partially guessing about people not paying tickets. I'm basing it on using this smartphone app that used to exist which allowed you to report bad drivers. It had access to the state database and would tell you how many unpaid tickets a license plate had associated with it. I reported one person for blocking a bike lane and they had 89 unpaid tickets. I reported several dozens more and it was common to see over 10 unpaid. All of this gives me a very gross feeling overall tbh. Drivers are the worst.