Revenue Generation

I received an email from my daughter a few days ago. It read:
"Dad, I got a $110.00 ticket this morning driving 34 mph on 8th Avenue- a busy one way street. Apparently the speed limit goes down to 20 mph near Downing because it is a school zone. They were pulling us over 3 at a time with 2 cops working the trap. I had no idea what was going on. When told of my offense, I asked why they don't have a flashing light to alert drivers. As much as the cop explained the ticket away with, "you don't want a little kid splattered across your windshield", if that was truly the concern of the government, wouldn't they install a flashing light? Or does installing a flashing light cut into their profits? Which is really more important?"

My response:
"You might consider fighting it. I got one a few yrs. ago on Mapleton. There was a pre-school in the bldg across Mapleton from the YMCA. The only signal was an orange metal disc on a sign post with the 20mph limit & the hours. I paid my fine, but soon after there appeared a flashing yellow light at that location, leading me to believe that a lot of people fought it and had their tickets dismissed.

More fundamentally speaking, these speed traps are all about funding the police jobs program. Police Depts inevitably have become another gov. jobs program. So they resort to speed traps to pay the policemen. Most people will drive at reasonable speeds, so government ends up spending lots of money to catch a few offenders. Or they set speed limits ridiculously low in order to generate speeding fine revenues. The money would be better spent getting those officers out of their cars and patrolling on foot in high crime areas, where they could prevent some real crimes like rape, robbery, vandalism & murder."