Obey those speed limits! Recession reducing ticket cushions

In a growing number of jurisdictions across the US, 35 mph means 35 mph – and 40 mph will get you a ticket, not a warning. State troopers and local police are responding to budgetary pressures by eliminating the cushions they customarily give drivers who travel over the speed limit.

A report in USA Today on the subject quotes James Baxter, president of the National Motorists’ Association, a Wisconsin-based group that helps drivers fight traffic tickets, as saying, "Not only are the (speeding) tolerances much lower, but the frequency of a warning instead of a ticket is way down.

"Most people, if they're stopped now, are getting a ticket even if it's only a minor violation of a few miles per hour," he continued, citing anecdotal evidence of drivers being pulled over at lower speeds.

While some experts attribute the reduced tolerance for speeding to the raising of speed limits in some states, recent research suggests local finances indeed play a bigger role. For example, a study of North Carolina police practices published last year in the Journal of Law and Economics showed that between 1990 and 2003, county police issued more tickets in years following a drop in general tax revenue. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the University of Arkansas-Little Rock have also found that a 10 percent drop in revenue growth in one year produced a 6.4 percent increase in speeding tickets the following year.

And availability of officers may also account for some of the changes. Sgt. Michael Edes, chairman of the National Troopers Coalition, told USA Today that his impression is that enforcement is getting no tougher. "I think you'll find [enforcement is] actually the opposite," he said. "A lot of states have cut (trooper) positions or frozen positions. Several states have grounded their aviation unit, so they're not doing as many speed details."

But in Canton, Ohio, where a drop in crime has freed officers to work more traffic details, police wrote more than four times as many traffic citations in January than they did in the same month of 2009. The extra revenue will let the understaffed police department hire more officers, Police Chief Dean McKimm told USA Today.

Written by Sandy Smith
For HULIQ.com

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