Putting money above the safety of Pennsylvania drivers

Putting money above the safety of Pennsylvania drivers

Pennsylvania Drivers:

Speed Trap Bill SB 251, authorizing RADAR and LIDAR for local Pennsylvania police should be voted down by the legislature. Speed Trap Bill SB 251 exists solely to unfairly tax safe drivers in Pennsylvania and has nothing to do with highway safety.

Putting money above the safety of Pennsylvania drivers is to be expected from the special interests who want your money.

Speed limits in Pennsylvania are purposely set too slow to facilitate ticket writing. 90% of the limits in Pennsylvania are posted too slow by 8 to 16 miles per hour [Federal Highway Administration study,1996 (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/97084/97084.pdf)]. That makes it easy to give expensive “speeding” tickets to safe drivers.

Yet officials who have zero knowledge of true highway safety would have you believe that there is an epidemic of speeders running amok that can only be cured by putting RADAR and LIDAR in the hands of local police. In fact, Pennsylvania’s highways have never been safer, according to PennDOT.

Local roads have speed limits set by officials with an agenda of raising revenue through issuance of speeding tickets, instead of having highway engineers set limits to the safest speed by using actual time-tested safety guidelines. The bill sponsors are preying on the public’s lack of true highway safety knowledge to ram their bills into law, as they constantly harp on the “speed kills” lie. US DOT Report Confirms Speed Not Major Accident Cause:

US Department of Transportation study finds only five percent of crashes caused by excessive speed https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2627.asp: that removes all justification for RADAR and LIDAR everywhere to unfairly tax reasonable and prudent drivers.

Add to that the inaccuracies of RADAR and LIDAR. We all know the stories of the tree clocked at 90 miles per hour: that is the rule with RADAR, not the exception. The accuracy of laser-based speed guns (LIDAR) has been shown to be unproven in 95% or more of the country's courts.

In this election year, tell your state Senator and Representative to VOTE NO on Speed Trap Bill SB 251.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Tom McCarey Member, Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Motorists Association

The opinions expressed in this letter belong to the author and do not necessarily represent those of the NMA or the NMA Foundation