Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Thousands of Speeding Tickets mean Thousands of Dollars in "Back To School"

Where does the money go from speeding tickets?

Answer: To the municipality whose officer issues the tickets!

As Ontario school children headed back to school, local police issued thousands of speeding ticket in the name of a "Back to School Campaign". The municipality of Clarington Ontario is advertising to the media that the local police have issued 1,500 speeding tickets.

The math is, 1500 times 100 dollars equals $150,000.00 in fines in two weeks.

As police departments send out their army of police officers to write speeding tickets in the name of public safety, the city collects thousands of dollars in traffic ticket fines.

Of the thousands of dollars created by the police how much goes back into actually making school zones safer from speeding motorists... not much.

After years of complaining that speeding motorists put our children at risk, how much traffic calming has been installed around school zones to slow down drivers when the police are not watching?

When are they going to install traffic calming and implement road design that makes traffic move slowly through a school zone? When the municipalities stop making millions of dollars per year on traffic ticket fines that's when.

Every year the police send their army of officers out to collect fees for speeding tickets, and it doesn't seem to stop the problem. Traffic calming, like bicycle lanes, stop signs, road design and speed bumps would stop the speeding within school zones but how much have you actually seen of this.

Of the thousands of motorists caught speeding in Ontario, most were driving less than 20 km/h over the limit, hardly dangerous, and certainly at a level that a speed bump would have slowed them down to a crawl.

Lets put an end to this revenue system for the municipality, get the police doing more productive work and install some speed bumps and traffic calming.