The North Dakota Supreme Court said cities can’t levy traffic fines that are higher than the state’s so the city of Grand Forks and other cities maybe lobbying the Legislature to change the law so that they can.
The rationale, as City Council member Curt Kreun articulated last night, is cities need these tools to deter speeding and other unsafe behavior.
This sounds right but all the ludicrous things government has done in the name of security since Sept. 11 — except for the things it’s supposed to do — has taught me not to take these statements at face value.
Studies suggest that speeding is dangerous when a driver goes significantly faster or slower than the prevailing speed. In one study, significant means more than 15 mph. Note that slower drivers are also a hazard. If we follow this to its logical conclusions, we should also levy fines against very slow drivers.
You may think that the prevailing speed is influenced by the speed limit. It is not. As this study notes, most people drive at speeds that they feel is fast enough but still gives them control of their vehicle. Speed limits don’t change that:
For years, traffic engineering texts have supported the conclusion that motorists ignore unreasonable speed limits. Both formal research and informal operational observations conducted over many years indicate that there is very little change in the mean or 85th percentile speed as the result of raising or lowering the posted speed limit on urban and rural nonlimited access highways.
The study found this conclusion to be true:
When the limits were lowered, a greater percentage of drivers exceeded the new limits. When speed limits were raised, more drivers were in compliance with the speed limits. Again, these figures do not represent a shift in driver behavior, but a change in how noncompliance is measured, i.e., from the posted speed limit.
Do speeding tickets change driver behavior? The answer is no.
Drivers who receive speeding citations are at increased risk of receiving subsequent speeding citations, suggesting that speeding citations have limited effects on deterrence in the context of the current traffic enforcement system.
The only people speeding tickets deter are female drivers who are generally considered by the insurance industry to be the safest drivers. For the less safe drivers, namely teens and men, speeding tickets have little impact. The perverse consequence is that heavy fines will only penalize drivers who threaten public safety the least and do nothing to stop those that threaten public safety the most.
In other words, Curt’s argument is sound in theory but doesn’t hold much water.
I should say that I’m deterred by speeding tickets. I would just as soon arrive late as give up money I’ve worked hard for. However, that’s because I am an old man, or I feel like it anyway. When I was younger, I sped all the time whether in North Dakota where the tickets are cheap or in Minnesota where they are not. Why? Because I was in a hurry and because I felt that if I paid attention to speed traps and followed fast drivers, I had a reasonable chance of escaping a ticket. This is somewhat true because I’ve only ever gotten tickets when I wasn’t paying attention. Nowadays, I’m too lazy to watch out for speed traps and it seems much easier to just stick close to the speed limit, which usually means somewhere within 5 to 10 mph.
There’s a far more intelligent way to slow people down than these asinine speeding tickets: Redesign the roads. In the traffic engineering world, this is known as traffic calming. This could mean anything from speed bumps to traffic islands to narrower lanes.
Here in town, parents have complained about drivers speeding in school zones and endangering their kids. Drivers do need to be careful but there would be fewer problems if the streets weren’t so blasted wide it feels like you could drive a lot faster.
I used to live near 17th Avenue South and, once in a while, when I come back from SuperTarget I’d see one of those "you are going this fast" radar gun-cum-display boards that the police have set up to remind people they’re going too fast. Well, that’s just stupid. That road is so wide I always feel like I should be going 40 mph and have to restrain myself for the public good. Why design a street that encourages fast driving and then put up a speed limit to fine them for it?
Yes, the street might be narrower if there were cars parked on the street and there might be when there’s a big game at the soccer field there. But most of the time there aren’t. There are also no lane markers dividing the parking area from the rest of the street so it looks like you’ve got this enormous lane big enough to drive a tank through.
Downtown is where you’ll find good examples of natural traffic calming. The streets are narrower and there are tons of cars parked on the street. Even though there’s plenty of room, I always feel like I’ve got to watch myself or I’ll nick one of those cars or squash some pedestrian stepping out between them. I don’t even know what the speed limit is. I just know I don’t want to go fast.
Perhaps before the city lobbies state lawmakers, it should put more of these traffic calming features in place first. Otherwise, it would look as if city leaders just want to make money. Of course, if they were using the fines to pay for the traffic calming features…
Just in case you wanted to read arguments and counter arguments in the Supreme Court case, here they are at the court’s Web site. Here’s the Supreme Court ruling. I don’t know why it’s not on the court Web site yet.
Notice that the court was answering a "certified question" from the district court. What this means is the lower court couldn’t figure out exactly what to do. This is different from an appeal in which the lower court does make a ruling but the losing party asks the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court. The case appears to be unusual because state law appears to be vague on whether home rule cities have to adhere to state traffic fines or not.
For the speeding fines, look here in the Century Code. It’s under 39-06.1-06 subsection 3. This goes on top of whatever is in subsection 2 so you’re never gonna get a $5 ticket.
Well, just two weeks ago, I was pulled over for doing 37 in a 25 MPH zone, and the fines were all crossed off and the officer wrote in $12.00, which is right along the lines with what the code there says.
I see Kreun has returend to one of his favorite pastimes: making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The reality is that whether it be traffic tickets (both moving violations and parking), sales taxes, property taxes, use taxes, whatever, the priority of Grand Forks government is to generate revenue streams. That he would try tp put some altruist spin on it just shows how little respect he has for citizens’ intelligence. GF is all about squeezing every penney it can out of both the populous and visitors in any way it can.
I think that if a group of citizens wanted to do some research and put together some proposals for traffic calming in Grand Forks for high-risk areas (near schools, etc), we might get some thing implemented. I amy be dreaming, of course.
This is very popular in Europe, where the idea is to limit the barriers between the pedestrians and the drivers, causing the drivers to necessarily have to become more aware of their surroundings and, as a result, drive more slowly. Removal of signs (speed limit and otherwise), removal of curbs between the road and the sidewalks, and the use of roundabouts all contribute to slower driving.
A publication called the Manual For Streets just came out of the UK that deals with how to emphasize pedestrians, bicycles and public transportation over automobile transportation. I’m not suggesting the removal of cars as the end goal here, but a change in emphasis in certain areas would probably have the same effects as traffic calming.
The MfS can be downloaded here: http://www.manualforstreets.org.uk/
An article on the cycling aspects of the MfS can be found here: http://www.camcycle.org.uk/newsletters/73/article6.html
What do you think?
WHere the heck are you going to build roundabouts in grand forks? take a look at the room required and tell me how it’s going to work? just cuz it works over there it will work here? who is going to keep a body count while the idiots are getting used to the lack of curbs and driving space? are you going to separate kids and adult deaths? maybe we should start driving on the left side of the road too? hell just send all the cops home to wait for calls to come in since all rules are going to be flushed anyway. looks like it was written by a bunch of car hating tree huggers.
Aw jeez, just calm down. You’re picking up the smallest bit and extrapolating it to the point of absurdity. That’s a lousy way to debate.
We can certainly have curb extensions and traffic islands without having any hate for cars. There was some plan to put traffic calming features on University Ave. a while back. I’m not sure what happened to them but it’s a perfectly logical solution.
On the Ave near my alma mater, the University of Washington, we had traffic calming in place years ago and nobody died because of them.
I’m all for removing speed limit signs.
“There was some plan to put traffic calming features on University Ave. a while back.”
Like lots of crosswalks, large flower pots, reduced speed limit? they are there.
How about along Central HS – maybe they will actually teach them how to use crosswalks.
It seems to me that we learned about crosswalks in kindergarten. How come the high school students now days don’t know about them? :)
Maybe they are the new, live, walking, two-legged traffic calmers. You have to slow down and watch your driving so you don’t run over them. Here all this time we thought they just couldn’t read. Better watch and see if they remove the speed limits or traffic lights around Central HS.
**Smile**
the last person hit by a car near Central High was a teacher – about 2 years ago…what does that say about our quality of education??
Struck by a student driver??
Hmm. maybe this problem should be looked at in terms of the perspective as to WHY people feel the need to speed. One reason: it’s because, for a city of this size, there are too few major arterials and too many poorly timed traffic signals on the arterials that exist…and people are frustrated with how long it takes to get across, which, unfortunately, the city growth patterns force many to do on a regular basis.
I’ve lived in other cities the size of Grand Forks where, with a well designed street/traffic system, it took 5..count them…5 minutes to get from one side of town to another even at the worst traffic times. I know of several others who can testify to the same thing.
I live on the south side of town and work on the north side, as do many. It takes nearly 20 minutes some mornings/evenings to make the commute from 32nd south to Gateway on Washington, a distance of approximately 3.5 miles. I suspect that the incidence of speeding in this town is strongly related to frustration at how long it actually takes to get around.
As Grand Forks grows, it would be wise to consider other cities who have…correctly…realized that a city’s growth is hampered by an inefficient road/traffic system. If the City council wants to encourage growth, it should look at fixing a street system that was well designed for 30000 people, but is poorly suited to a city closer to double that size…particularly one with many out of town shoppers now swelling the streets. From what I’ve seen driving around town, there are quite a few drivers, frustrated with the major arterials, who are now using the smaller 2-lane arterials which are actually faster to traverse going across town.
All that being said, I agree that traffic calming would appropriate in some locations in some neighborhoods…most notably near schools. But a complete solution also needs to involve improving cross-town traffic flow, which can be done by increasing number and/or capacity of arterials, plus a sensible programming of traffic signals so that one doesn’t have to stop even 10 seconds.
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