Watch out, leadfoots: Some local and state governments are trying to patch budget potholes with big increases in traffic fines and enforcement.
If you're headed for a sightseeing day at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, you'd better leave your lead foot at home.
The police in Canton are waiting for you.
Spurred in part by the recession and its effects on city coffers, Canton is handing out more speeding and other traffic tickets. Make that a lot more tickets: Canton's finest issued 4,505 citations for moving violations in the first quarter of 2010 -- a 221% increase over the 1,405 tickets issued in last year's first quarter.
"You could say that it was born out of the deteriorating economy," Police Chief Dean McKimm says of the ramped-up enforcement. Handing out more traffic tickets was a way to both boost traffic safety and bring in dollars.
"We were facing layoffs, and we were trying to think outside the box," he says. "I'll be very blunt about that: It does save jobs. It was kind of a no-brainer."
Canton's experience may confirm what you've long suspected: Tickets sometimes have as much to do with revenue as safety. And now, as a soured economy and other factors further empty government piggy banks, many are turning to law enforcement to serve as part-time "tax" collectors -- with guns and badges.
Many states and cities no longer even try to hide that fact.
Making up for lost money
Cities, counties and other government agencies have found that there's a lot of money to be made in stepped-up traffic enforcement:
•In January, Georgia's new "superspeeder" law kicked in. Get caught going 85 mph or more on a four-lane road in the Peach State and you'll pay $200 on top of the regular ticket, which is often well more than $100. You'll do the same if you go 75 mph or more on a two-lane road. Authorities said it filled a niche between regular speeding and reckless-driving violations. In February, superspeeder tickets totaled 1,084. Tennessee is considering a similar law.
•A Colorado law that went into effect in 2009 doubled fines for speeding (the supporting information noted it would raise about $12 million annually for the strapped state). Another law has made speed guns mandatory in road-work zones.
•In 2009, California added a $35 assessment to all traffic violations to help renovate 41 courthouses statewide. You'll pay even if the courthouse where you show up to pay the ticket isn't getting so much as a coat of paint.
•The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority said it would collect an additional $1.2 million in fines from speeding tickets in 2008 to make up for lost revenue when troopers from the Massachusetts State Police were transferred the previous year to work around Boston's "Big Dig" project.
'Welcome to Detroit; here's a ticket'
The complicated, sometimes comical, experience of two Michigan police departments shows how sticky the issue can get.
A Detroit News analysis in 2008 found that metro-area police departments had "drastically increased" the number of tickets issued for moving violations as revenue from the state -- in the throes of multiple economic crises -- had declined markedly.
One department, in Romulus, issued 12,040 tickets in 2007 -- a 136% increase since 2002 -- despite a population of just 25,000, according to the newspaper's analysis. Detroit Metropolitan Airport sits within the city and is accessed by two interstate highways. Unmarked Romulus patrol cars regularly ticket drivers exiting to the airport or accelerating away from it.
The city's traffic enforcement effort has grown so aggressive, some say, that a remarkable cat-and-mouse game has sprung up between airport officials and Romulus police.
"We have taken the initiative of alerting our customers," airport spokesman Michael Conway says. How? By handing out warning fliers to drivers and telling airport police to park near the unmarked patrol cars with their lights flashing, to slow motorists.
Romulus police Lt. John Leacher says officers don't have a mandate to fill city coffers. "We've been doing this (emphasis) for the last four years," he says, "and we haven't been doing anything different than we were then."
It's not the welcome mat that the Detroit area should be rolling out, Conway says. "The first message out-of-town visitors get is, 'Welcome to Detroit; here's a ticket.'"
