Currently there are many communities that highways run through across the country who get a significant portion of their revenue from setting up speed traps and ticketing motorists who speed through their jurisdiction. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed into law a bill that he hopes will help prevent towns from padding their budgets with money earned with unnecessary speed traps.
The bill, HB103, states that no city, town, or village may receive more than 30% of its annual general operating revenue from traffic fines resulting from violations on state highways. Any amount of money gained over 30% would need to be sent to the Department of Revenue and then distributed to public schools in the country.
The bill also includes a section dealing with a red light rule change. The red light change is a measure to reduce the number of red-light violation tickets handed out by allowing vehicles to be “in an intersection while a red signal is being displayed if the operator of the motor vehicle entered the intersection during a yellow signal interval.”
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Eh, personally they should leave this alone. I don’t find speed traps “unnecessary” because any vehicle with 4 wheels is usually speeding when not in the view of a law enforcement officer anyway.
If they can’t get good income at an idiot motorist’s expense, then well just see higher taxes on everything else to compensate.
Instead they should work on new methods in catching under the radar traffic law breakers like interstate photogates (have 2 sensors over the highway, first one catches the license place and starts the timer on it, second one catches the plate and ends the timer. If the vehicle crossed the distance faster than a certain time threshold, speeding ticket. Good place to test this is Chicago toll booth system on the open road tolling lanes).
Drive through Waldo, FL a few times and see if you still feel that way. A lot of these towns will ticket for 1-3 mph over the limit, because chances are it’s somebody just passing through who would never be able to fight it. They also have some shady cops and legal systems in place to ensure the town gets their money.
They need to pass the same law here in La the town of Henderson La have it bad for speed traps
Andrew, many of the towns that have speed cameras did not vote to have them put in, their administrators simply threw them in and it in many cases takes about a year to vote and take them out.
In my home town in Ohio, our mayor decided 5 redlight/speeding cameras where necessary to bulk up our budget and install them without asking The cities citizens.
It took us over 9 months to get the cameras out and another 3 months after that for us to get him out of the office for doing something as stupid as what he did.
(If memory serves me correctly, he only got 100 votes in a town with 8,000 votes.)
What the article, and some commenters, fail to address is that speed traps use artificially low speed limits in order to generate the revenue. Such a town might take a section of road that could be traveled safely at 55mph, make the limit 30mph and enforce it aggressively. Make no mistake, speed trap towns are quite obvious to officials who see the amount of funds generated for a town from one location, how much of a towns budget is the result of traffic infractions and what those infractions are, particularly when compared to the norms established by the vast majority of other communities. The fact that they passed such a law shows this was an issue fixing to become a real problem for politicians and this is their way of correcting it without singling out the bad actors
Insted of people whining about speed traps, how about they concern themselves with following the rules and not speeding in the first place? It’s like football players whining about how the opposing teams celebrate scoring tocuhdowns. If you do not like the way they celebrate, don’t let them score. Simple as that. Too many whiners in the world these days..
Portland, oregon is has for speed traps. And while traps may not be a problem they continue to lower the speed so much on freeways that everyone is speeding. I’m not sure if this is a problem else where 🙂 but its becoming ridiculous. While they lower the speed to 50 there are still accidents everyday. Pretty soon the speed will be 45 and they will still be handing out tickets for traveling too fast. It makes you wonder if cities purposely lower their speeds to bring in more profit.
You clearly don’t understand what a speed limit is if you say “don’t speed.”
A speed limit is not a traffic control device, it is information. A posted speed limit is suppose to tell you what speed the road is designed for. You could actually remove ALL posted speed limits in the USA, post a 150 mph limit, or post a 10 MPH limit. The average speed of traffic would not change. People drive the speed the engineers designed a road to handle. Posting the wrong speed limit is simply giving people the wrong information. It is no different from posting the wrong height information for an underpass. Imagine if a city decided to label all their bridges at 5ft clearance when they are really 14ft high, or imagine if they labeled them all 14 ft when they are really 10ft. The information becomes wrong. The locals know the info is incorrect and ignore it, where as people from out of the area don’t know the info is wrong and need to decide between following it or following the locals (and possibly get into an accident because of the misinformation)
If you want to slow down traffic, you do not do it by building a road for 55 mph traffic, and then posting a 25mph speed limit. You need the road to be designed for 25 traffic. Doing anything else is simply the government lying to you saying it is for “safety” when all they are doing is trying to make money. Often this safety campaign actually CAUSES more accidents and makes the road less safe. They are willing to let people die just so they can make some money off entrapment of drivers. The more people who get injured and die, the more ammunition they have to “justify” the safety campaign or even lowering the speed limit more so they can simply generate more revenue.