The newspapers ran a story lately about a speeding crackdown on Michigan Xways.
They will write for 5 over.
seat belts
anything hanging from the mirror
windshield cracks
turn signal usage
They will have 50 police cars on duty. They will be expected to write a ticket every 10 minutes. They have 30 new Crown Vics unmarked .
What is onerous is it is being done for revenue. They expect to generate 9 million dollars . I mill will go in police overtime.
Generally police say they write tickets to make roads safer. That can be argued but can a crackdown like this be justified. ?
Well being pulled over for no seat belts and failing to use turn signals at least make sense - those do seem to make roads (and yourself) less safe.
But if I got pulled over and got a ticket for going 70 in a 65, I’d be pissed. How do you pass anyone if you can’t go over the limit at all?
Legally if they are travelling at the speed limit there would be no reason to pass.
I have no problem with it. To my knowledge all of those things are ticketable offenses. I didn’t know about the item hanging from the mirror one though.
A year or so ago there was a crack down on the interstate here, in response to a year with a dramatically high number of fatalities in the previous year. Didn’t have a problem with that.
I actually think it’s good to do periodically; people get complacent and more and more sloppy and careless as drivers as time goes on. Having a little wake-up call periodically isn’t a bad thing.
What if you needed to get around someone to get over to your exit? If everyone was going exactly 65, then there’d be no fluctuation in the distances cars are from one another. Guess you could go slower, but that’s just as bad as going faster for traffic, if not worse - you’d be making everyone else brake too when they wouldn’t have to if you sped up instead.
I wonder how much of the new revenue will go for overtime at the courthouses, which will be jammed by people fighting their tickets?
The problem with it is not that they’re enforcing the law, it’s that they’ve spent umpteen years specifically NOT enforcing the law and are choosing to change their minds only because they can squeeze millions of dollars out of it.
This is an urban legend:
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080117/BLOG13/80117012/1004/NEWS
Debunked by snopes last time the same email myth circulated here: About Those 'Speeding Ticket Frenzy' Alerts | Snopes.com
gonzomax, can you post a link?
I was sent an email. Then the Free press ran a story saying pretty much the same thing. We will find out in a couple weeks for sure.
I searched the Freep but yesterday was garbage day. It is gonee.
I searched the Free Press online, and got to this page, with an article from the 16th titled “E-mail alert about ticket blitz is bogus”, but you have to buy the article. We might still have that issue, I’ll check tonight if I remember.
ETA: And if I had looked at the simulpost above my first post, this might be relevent…
The title of the article that I cited is:
But first sentence, quoted above, tells the story. It’s about how the email you got was an urban legend.
(Emphasis added.)
Did you read the Free Press article, or just notice the headline?
http://wcco.com/crime/speed.speeding.crackdown.2.370193.html Heres an example. It does happen. I have a cop friend at racketball. i will ask him.
I don’t think anybody denies that police sometimes get aggressive about enforcement of traffic laws. This article, though, lacks the spurious claim of 30 new unmarked cruisers, which is common to the email urban legend and also the claim that the enforcement uptick is for the purpose of generating revenue.
Instead this article cites safety as the key reason:
The scheme that the email describes, where 1 million dollars is earmarked for overtime simply doesn’t fit with the way Michigan distributes ticket revenue:
http://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDFs/traf.pdf
Also the fact that the identical email has circulated in Michigan in previous years, and in other jurisdictions (all are buying the same number of cruisers, setting the same $9M objective, and planning to use $1M for overtime? Really?) marks this particular story as a fake. Especially when the only newspaper story anybody can find says it’s a fake and quotes a representative of the Michigan State Police as calling it one.
Dad, learn to post stuff like this in MPSIMS.
I figured it was a possible debate about whether tickets are designed to make roads safer or to gather revenue.
One more nail in the coffin:
As far as the debate,
Do you see these objectives as mutually exclusive?
Aren’t they making the roads safer *and * generating revenue?
No. What is safe about packing people together on the road moving in one big pack? For those of us that watch auto racing, this bears an eerie similarity to “restrictor-plate” racing, i.e., Daytona and Talladega, tracks that are known for their monstrous crashes, a direct result of everybody going the same speed in close proximity to each other.
It is far more beneficial to let people go by and break the pack up a little bit. Lots of traffic leads to nervous drivers, panic stops, multi-car accidents, and traffic jams. Breaking it up lets people out of the logjams and allows them to find more open space, which dramatically increases the comfort level (and by extension, the level of safety) of the average driver.
The problem with “traffic enforcement” during high-volume times is that when people see police officers they slow down, hit the brakes, or take their eyes off the road for a split-second to check their speed. That is the formula for disaster, and the cause of many thousands of reactionary traffic jams and accidents. Therefore, they cause the very thing they purport to prevent, unsafe driving conditions.
With the exception of egregious speeding and weaving through traffic and drunk driving enforcement, traffic enforcement is nothing but revenue generation. Look at the laws of your vicinity and tell me that some of them aren’t written to extract max dollars out of the public over the most petty of things.
No passing stopped school busses, 35mph through town (where all the pedestrians are), kids must be buckled in, stopping at stop signs, working equipment on your car, no passing in “no passing” zone, pedestrian right of way. By Jove, I think he’s got it!! You’re right, they are all nothing buy revenue generators.