The Traveling Public Can Go Elsewhere
By James Baxter, NMA President
According to public opinion, there are 57,000 speed traps in the United States. That’s how many speed traps have been listed by individuals on SpeedTrap.org, a website sponsored by the NMA. That averages out to 1140 speed traps per state.
Of course some states lead the charge, like California with 5399 speed traps. On the other end of the spectrum is Alaska with “only” 51 speed traps. These are not numbers you’re likely to find published in state tourism brochures. However, they are numbers you might want to consider when planning your next vacation.
Speed traps are an economic phenomenon; they are a source of revenue for state and local governments, local court systems and police departments. Adding extra juice to the financial pie are federal funds targeted on speed enforcement. This is a double dipping extravaganza where police departments not only bag the fines but also get federal funds for manpower, equipment, and related expenses.
We the people get to pay for this on both ends, through our taxes and then the ticket fines and insurance surcharges.
The chart at the bottom of this post lists the number of speed traps in each state. You might want to write a letter to the governor and/or tourism agency in one or more of these states, perhaps a state you were planning on visiting, and let them know that while you’re happy to spend money on goods and services you are not keen on being milked by the state patrol or a small town ticket mill. Consequently, you are reconsidering your travel plans.
You will probably receive a condescending bureaucratic reply saying something like “if you abide by our traffic laws you should have no occasion to be stopped and cited by one of our fine police officers.” This, of course, is nonsense and they know it.
But, bottom line, they’ll get the message “if you’re going to screw the traveling public, the traveling public can go elsewhere.”
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The public percieves any enforcement of speed limit laws as a “speed trap”. That being said a listed “speed trap” is not necessarily a trap for motorists who drive in a safe, sane, reasonable manner. To imply as James Baxter has that every listed “speed trap” is one that is set with malicious intent towards the motorists is absolutely idiotic. If one were to compare the above chart to interstate mapping I think interestingly you’ll find that the states listed as having the highest number of speed traps also have the higher number of interstates or miles of interstates passing through them. States like Alaska or Hawaii would have an extremely low number of speed traps simply because the fewer miles of freeway available for travel in those states. I am going to take Jim Baxter’s advice and write my govenor and thank him for keeping my state as one of the safest even though it is listed as having one of the highest content of “speed traps”. Of the 57,000 listed speed traps I think you’d be hard pressed to locate 1000 actual ‘speed traps” with the remainder being nothing more than simplistic speed enforcement. The only people that are in the make up of the traveling public that will percieve that they are being screwed by normal everyday speed enforcement are those who willingly break the traffic laws and expect no retribution for doing so.
I remember back in the days of the CB craze when Florida removed all the mile markers from their highways so people couldn’t accurately warn each other on the CB about lurking cops with radar guns. It doesn’t matter if it fits some legalistic, narrowly-defined specification of a speed trap. All it takes is public perception of it. Some may be worse than others, but it doesn’t reduce the validity of the lesser ones.
It’s only in the movies where the doctor tells a man who was shot with a .32, “I’ve got people in here who’ve been shot with .357 Magnums, what are you bothering me with a little flesh wound for???”
If they’re waiting to catch you, it’s a trap. It may be perfectly legitimate, but there’s nothing wrong with warning people about it, anyway. Except to those who believe that someone flashing their headlights to warn oncoming motorists is somehow breaking the law.
Just because someone posts where they got a speeding ticket does not mean it was a speed trap. There are hundreds of places on that site that are not in almost anyones definitinon a speed trap. If the actual posts on that site were actual speed traps that need to be shut down then something could be done about it.
Driving 25 mph over the limit is being an idiot? I used to do that all the time during the 55 speed limit days. Now, 80 mph is legal in Texas. Just shows the roads we drive on all have underposted speed limits.
Here’s the raw data to play around with:
http://www.motorists.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/TrapsByState.csv
The numbers have changed a bit, but it’s largely the same.
Yeah, these raw numbers by state don’t tell us much except that a state with more roads and more people is more likely to have more speed traps.
Maybe we should normalize it by the number of paved miles of road.
Well, I have long advocated requiring all jurisdiction’s who perform traffic control activities be required to send periodic detailed reports to their prospective Departments of Public Safety for publishing on the Internet. This would give us accurate data that could be used for a variety of purposes. The NMA survey is currently the only source we have and it’s pretty rudimentary.
Currently enforcement data is treated more or less like a state secret. Ever wonder why. I can only imagine how reveling this information would be.
First, such data would quickly show the real speed trap towns in glaring colors. Just compare towns of similar populations against the No. of citations issued.There might be other factors to consider later on.
Second, when we see about 90 percent of all citations are written for speeding while looking on the accident causation side we see maybe 5 percent of all accidents are caused by speeding what does that tell you. Ever wonder why we find data of every dimension stemming from traffic accidents…but what about the enforcement side? How can we determine what type and amount of enforcement affects accident prevention the most if we don’t know both sides of the equation?
Third, knowing the whole truth would undoubtedly generate a call for reforms. Municipalities know this. For instance a speed trap law could almost be triggered automatically on violators using this data. Jurisdictions using traffic citation quota’s could be possibly be spotted.
You have to be able to point to reliable information when requesting new laws to deal with abusive traffic control. There’s a reason why all these municipalities out there don’t want you prying into their little tale of corruption.
While there are plenty of speed traps listed, I commonly disagree with the severity of what’s listed. There’s one listed that comments the speed limit reduced from 50 to 35, but the town is clearly incorrect. In another listing, I go thru there often, and have never seen a cop there. One poster also sighted the wrong speed limit, which never appears on that roadway.
While I don’t agree with speed traps, I think that many of the traps listed are due to some idiot going way over the speed limit, getting caught, then claiming that they were in a speed trap. If you were going 5 mph over the limit, that’s a speed trap. If you’re doing 25 mph over, that’s not a speed trap, that’s being an idiot.
I agree with Jim. It would be interesting to see it normalized by population and the area of the state.
Might be good to normalize the graph by state population.
normalized= numberOfTraps/numberOfPeopleInState