Thursday, January 12, 2006

What happened to 12mph?

The speed cameras will be starting soon, as seen in today's QCTimes article about them.

Apparently after only 90 days the 12mph buffer zone will decrease to only 10mph in "residential areas" and 8mph in schools zones.

I disagree with having the speed cameras send out tickets for anything that the average police officer wouldn't stop someone for, and 8 or 10mph is pretty iffy. I'm also curious what counts as a residential area. Is 2700 Brady residential? The 2900 block of Harrison? There are houses along those streets, but they're more like cross-town arteries than residential streets.

I wish they'd just set them to only ticket people going 15 or more over. I think they'd catch plenty of people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a thought on this; the national average for State Patrols on highways and interstates is an 8-10 miles per hour leeway. I don’t think that the DPD is doing anything unusual here. Besides, if the speed limit is set at 35 MPH, then that is the limit, if you go over, you are in violation. I would think that if people have a problem with going that speed, then they should work though the process to have the limits raised. The opinion that an officer won’t stop you and write a ticket for the same offence simply speaks badly about our officers.

QuadCityImages said...

Well, its certainly up to debate, but Iowa may or may not have a so-called "Right to speed" law that says tickets for low amounts over the speed limit are not counted as moving violations. I can't find the actual section of Iowa code that says this though, although I found it mentioned all over the internet... (must be true, eh?)

Of course, this doesn't really matter because the camera tickets aren't moving violations either. A millionaire could rack up 20,000 tickets from the speed cameras without worry of losing his license. However, I would think the DPD would put some actual traffic cops on the case if someone did that.