Speed Trap Bill SB 251

Speed Trap Bill SB 251

To All Drivers:

Speed Trap Bill SB 251, authorizing RADAR for municipal police, should be VOTED DOWN in this election year.

50 years of government propaganda and misinformation about highway safety makes it easy for our elected officials to declare that unless we give local police radar guns, everybody's going to die! And far too many otherwise reasonable people agree, so in the end, the special interests who profit from RADAR, the RADAR manufacturers, the government, the police, and the courts, get their go-ahead to unfairly tax drivers.

There is no epidemic crisis of speeding, only an epidemic crisis of highway engineering malpractice allied with and abetted by a few politicians seeking more and more money from drivers under the guise of “highway safety.”

Excess speed is a cause of accidents less than 5% of the time, according to the National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) [DOT HS 811 059 National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey]. Speed as a cause of accidents when traffic is free flowing is a rare event, yet this is when the majority of citations are written. Speed traps are staged where it is safe to drive faster to make it easy for the cops to write tickets. Speed Trap Bill SB 251 would spawn speed traps everywhere by arming police with inaccurate RADAR guns.

Posted speed limits are at the bottom of all of this. What is the safe speed and who decides? If it were up to some politicians, we'd be driving cars that could only go 20 miles per hour, and that would suit the Progressives just fine. The core tenet of reasonable traffic laws, safety and due process is that the super majority of people act in a safe and responsible manner, and they do drive safely for the conditions present. An engineering concept known as the 85th Percentile Speed very simply says that 85 out of 100 motor vehicles will normally travel at or below a speed which is reasonable and prudent. It is the safest speed with the most compliance. But that makes the job of the police, that is, to collect taxes for the government, very difficult indeed.

The Federal Highway Safety Administration (FHwA) found that 90% of the time speed limits are posted 8 to 16 miles per hour below the safest speed [Report No. FHWA-RD-92-084 Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed Limits] . Because politicians respond to complaints from uninformed and misled constituents about "speeders" they push for arming all police state-wide with RADAR guns, while keeping limits too low and withholding NHTSA and FHwA statistics showing that there is no crisis.

Arbitrarily, unrealistic speed zones cannot be expected to reduce accidents and may, in fact, adversely affect traffic safety by confusing drivers and increasing speed differentials. Hunting down drivers with RADAR guns will not improve highway safety, and the unfair and unnecessary enforcement of too-low limits will foster contempt for law enforcement. Raising money is the one and only reason for RADAR. Speed Trap Bill SB 251 should be VOTED DOWN. Tell your Representative and Senator. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Tom McCarey Member, National Motorists Association

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