The Case for Automated Speed Enforcement
By: Sam Morrissey
Tags: Traffic, Speeding, Technology, Automation, Traffic Safety

I was disheartened to read the column in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Titled “In Sacramento, legislative attempts to slow down drivers have hit speed bumps,” the column presented information that unfortunately came as no surprise. When I first learned of the two bills in the state assembly and senate, respectively, about one month prior, I was excited and cautiously optimistic.

I was excited because speeding is directly attributed to more than 25% of all annual traffic fatalities, and exacerbates the additional nearly 10% of traffic fatalities related to “distraction,” and the severity of the almost 20% of fatalities of pedestrians and bicyclists. Together, speeding is related to nearly half of all annual roadway fatalities!

Anyone who has spent any time on a freeway in Los Angeles County in the last few months knows that there is A LOT of speeding. Anecdotally, I know this because when I drive my family in our minivan down to Orange County to visit relatives, I use the carpool lane and typically set the cruise control to a sensible speed around 70 mph. This is above the posted speed limit of 65 mph, I know, and to me it is sensible based on how many times I’m tailgated by aggressive vehicles or illegally passed by vehicles traveling well over 70 mph.

I personally don’t believe that anyone can say that speeding isn’t an epidemic problem on our highways with a straight face.

That’s why I was so excited for the possibility of automated speed enforcement (ASE) in California. The technology offers a possibility to directly address a problem that results in 20,000 or more traffic deaths each year.

Getting a speeding ticket is no fun, and costs a lot of money, once all the additional fees are placed on top. I know this from personal experience. When I was in my 20s I was a very aggressive driver. And after getting two speeding tickets within an 18-month period, I decided that I was done paying expensive fines and didn’t want to risk paying more or potentially even losing my license. So I stopped aggressively speeding. This is what psychologists call behavior change, and it was behavior change driven by a realization that there were consequences to my decisions to drive well over the posted speed limit.

Automated speed enforcement provides the ability to promote a positive behavior change in our large driving population well beyond the capabilities of our existing enforcement tools — police and public safety officers with the authority to enforce speed limits.

Consider this: According to the data I was able to find, there are likely around 1,100 uniformed California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers in the Southern Division (which includes Los Angeles County). On an average day in Los Angeles County there are somewhere between 28 Million and 57 Million vehicle trips on all of the state highways, driven by both the owners of the nearly 5.5 Million registered automobiles in the County as well as all the other vehicles driving through, into, or out of the County. (Note that this is potentially a very conservatively low estimate.)

Infographic by Sam Morrissey

This means that each uniformed CHP officer monitoring roadway traffic on a state highway sees somewhere between 3,125 and 6,250 vehicles during an eight-hour shift, or between 50 and 100 vehicles per minute. Based on my anecdotal experience on LA freeways, and I hope yours too, I can say that I see quite a few speeding vehicles every minute. So one uniformed CHP officer needs to exercise a huge amount of judgment to pick which one, if any, of those 50 to 100 vehicles per minute, they might want to stop for speeding. And during the time an officer is writing a ticket for that speeding vehicle? Well, every minute spent writing a speeding ticket for one vehicle means that 50 to 100 more vehicles are driving by. How many of those vehicles are traveling at an unsafe speed? We just don’t know. But we can guess, because of what we see everyday with our own eyes.

It would seem that our CHP officers, as well as County sheriffs and local police and traffic officers, are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vehicles to enforce. There’s just too many vehicles on the road for our human enforcement officers to effectively monitor and enforce. Not to mention all of the other more critical public safety issues that we rely on these officers to address.

So it would seem that automated speed enforcement would be a simple solution to address a very real problem. And the technology could allow our enforcement officers to focus on more pressing issues, while at the same time helping us make a real dent in a true public safety issue that ultimately requires individual behavior change.

But the CHP and other police organizations are opposing these two bills, or at least were. The argument seems to be a potential fear of losing jobs; but that simply isn’t justified by the facts of how many vehicles are out there and the limits of human enforcement.

There are definitely other specific issues to be ironed out in regards to automated speed enforcement. A graduated fine system would ensure that people who simply make a mistake, perhaps aren’t chronic aggressive speeding drivers, or people with limited financial means don’t get hit with massive fines that lead to further economic hardship. It would also address the concerns about households where people perhaps share a single car — would the ASE system know who was driving the car? Of course not; but the people in the household would certainly be aware of the need to pay close attention to posted speed limits and have a good talk to make sure no greater fines were imposed upon subsequent speeding infractions.

And of course how we build our roads should change to make sure we’re not over-designing to facilitate further increased driver speeds; rather, road design should reflect the context of the surrounding land uses and users. Neighborhood streets should feel like a place where you can’t drive over the speed limit, and the setting of speed limits should reflect those characteristics, and not just the average (or 85th percentile) speed of cars that typically drive the road.

Those other items notwithstanding, we need to move forward with automated speed enforcement. To me it is a very simple solution to a very real problem. And our enforcement personnel are just overwhelmed. We need to implement ASE as widely and ubiquitously as possible to effect the positive behavior change we need to reduce the nearly 20,000 speeding related traffic deaths on America’s highways each year. It’s simply a better way of doing things.

A few footnotes: