We had looked forward to the Braves game in Atlanta for weeks. I had gotten great tickets at a great price off SeeMySeat.com, so the trip from Orlando to Atlanta had been affordable. When you get $8.00 tickets on the third-base side of the in-field, it is worth driving a little to see your team. Especially when your boy has never been to a regular season game.

We got to Atlanta on a Friday afternoon and went straight to Turner field. Turner Field is a dream. The staff is super-friendly, and they all acted like they really wanted us to be there. Coming from Orlando, I’m used to surly employees at attractions, but this was totally different. These folks actually smiled, thanked us for coming, and were helpful. The courtyard of Turner Field is full of entertainment like the Cartoon Network Zone for kids. Our seats were great, and the huge jumbotron kept my seven-year-old son in a high state of amusement.

Watching the Braves rip the Tigers, I made a decision right then and there. As long as I could find good prices on tickets to make the trip affordable, I would bring the boy to at least a few more regular season games.

That was Friday night, by Saturday things had changed. We spent the night with some friends in Fayetteville, GA just outside Atlanta. On Saturday, we left their house early to go hike Stone Mountain, before doing the long trek back to Orlando down I-75. Georgia seems to have an aversion to road signs for some reason, so I was almost immediately turned around. I made it to a numbered state highway, and then was trying to drive, watch for ‘Atlanta This Way!’ signs and check my GPS to figure out where the heck I was. Which is why I missed the sign switching the speed limit from 55 MPH to 45 MPH.

Missed it, that is, until a local cop barrelled across a grass median, cut off two cars behind me, and then pulled me over for speeding. He was polite enough to point out where the sign was. Of course, from where I was sitting I could actually see the 55 MPH sign ahead of me, because the total distance of reduced speed on a six-lane, divided state highway was less than one mile.

Suddenly, I had a massive ticket in my hands, with a threat to revoke my license and issue a warrant for my arrest if I failed to pay it. My affordable trip to Atlanta had just gotten unaffordable courtesy of small town law enforcement.

I refused to let this ruin my trip. So I took the boy on to Stone Mountain. On the way into Atlanta, we passed eleven (I counted) more county and city police officers with cars stopped. Most of them were on I-285, which has a 55 MPH speed limit, despite being an eight-lane divided highway in perfect condition. The problem is that if you drive 55 MPH (which I did after the ticket) you are blown off the road. The local cops know this, and so use this section of Atlanta as their personal hunting preserve.

When we came back on that stretch later in the day, traffic was just as heavy and just as fast as it had been in the morning, but not a cop in sight. They must have made their quota for the day, and then packed it in. Meantime, average speed on I-285 was hitting 70 MPH, but that was not a problem since the road is so smooth and well-engineered that it makes the Autobanh look like a patch of dirt.

As I drove home that night down I-75, I realized that I wouldn’t be going up to Atlanta again anytime soon. I was fuming over everything from the cost of the speeding ticket, to the way the cop had treated me in my minivan with my kid in the back, to the way cops in the Atlanta area resemble tax predators. Because of all that, my big plans of Braves games with my boy were just not going to happen. That was sad for me and him, of course, but it is also sad for all the businesses in the Atlanta area that won’t be getting my money.

Localities and businesses spend hundred of millions of dollars a year to lure tourists. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels, sports venues, attractions, state parks, plus all the businesses that service them, depend on getting people to show up and spend money. Which is why they invite us constantly in a never-ending stream of ads, and we often take them up on their invitations. We show up at tourist destinations all over the U.S. in our mini-vans, kids in tow, driving unfamiliar roads with poor signs, and many of us end up getting massive speeding tickets for our trouble.

Then we go home and tell all our friends about it. They tell their friends, and then their friends. Many of us also blog on the Internet as well, which means that poor, cash-strapped business owners have to read the following words, “Never go to Fayetteville, GA because it’s a speed trap, and try to avoid Atlanta in general because the cops are out to get you on the Interstates.”

How many millions of dollars in advertising goodwill just evaporated thanks to that preceding sentence?

When cops put the screws to out-of-town visitors, the businesses within the community tied to tourism directly suffer. The businesses which sell to those businesses suffer. In fact, everyone suffers but the police, who always seem to do quite well for themselves.

The economy is not doing well. My own company has shed 40% of its workforce in six months, and we are actually profitable. Imagine the job cuts in companies which are losing money. With fewer people financially able to travel, the last thing a business owner can afford is to have the local police force driving away the client base.

One business owner who figured that for himself was Ken Altman, a fine arts dealer in Sedona, AZ, who had this to say about his own police force:

“Receiving a traffic ticket for going five miles an hour above the speed limit is a serious negative for visitors,” Mr. Altman said. “It discourages them and they go back home and spread the word Sedona is not a friendly place to visit.”

When business owners, struggling for their lives, make their concerns known to their local police – the response is almost always that public safety trumps all else. “Speed Kills!” is the bumper sticker response from police forces all over the country as the catch-all justification for their speed traps.

But what are the facts? Well, they are quite surprising and not at all what the police what you to hear.

Fact 1: Speed is the primary factor in only a small number of accidents. The National Highway and Safety Administration examined over 5,400 crashes across a nearly three-year period and presented evidence that excessive speed, while it may cause more serious injuries in the event of an accident, is not a leading cause of accidents.

Here is a summary of the results:

Traveling to fast for the conditions was the critical pre-crash event in only 5% of cases, according to the study. The NHTSA says that 41% of all driver-related critical events were recognition errors related to inattention and internal or external distractions.

Think about that for a minute. Driving too fast for conditions is the primary factor in 5% of accidents in this study. Similar studies in Britain and Australia returned a figure as potentially high as 7.3%. Notice that this has to do with conditions, not with posted speed limits. A driver can be driving 45 MPH on a highway with a 70 MPH limit during a snowstorm, and be driving too fast for conditions while still being less than the legal speed limit.

The facts are quite plain. The majority of drivers will drive safely depending on the conditions present. Aggressive enforcement of speed limits does not increase safety, because speed is not really a leading cause of accidents in any case.

In addition, there is a great deal of evidence that speed limits are often intentionally set too low. The fact that speed limits are the most widely ignored traffic regulation should give everyone pause. If so many drivers safely speed, meaning they drive appropriately for the conditions but violate the posted limit, are the overall speed limits too low? And if they are too low, why does this situation persist?

Fact 2: Slower speeds produce more dangerous driving conditions. Look at the results above again. 41% of crashes studied resulted from inattention. A study in Britain found the following:

Most research agrees that it is those who drive at around the 85th percentile of the speed on a particular road who tend to be the safest drivers. On British motorways for example, this equates to those who drive at about 85 mph or 15mph above the speed limit. Conversely, it is the slowest drivers who are the most risky drivers: 'The accident involvement rates on streets and highways in urban areas was highest for the slowest 5 percent of traffic, lowest for traffic in the 30 to 95 percentile range and increased for the fastest 5 percent of traffic.'

Face it – when do you send text messages, do your hair, make calls, put on makeup, or eat while driving? When zipping down the interstate at 80 MPH, or when cruising around at 45 MPH? The answer is obvious. When people are driving at higher speeds, they tend to pay attention. Reduce the speed, you also increase the likelihood of driver inattention.

Who tickets slow drivers? Who tickets inattentive drivers? There are no public safety campaigns to get people to pay attention to what they are doing.

Instead, all the focus is on speeding above the posted speed limits – an action that is not dangerous as long as you are driving appropriately for conditions.

Fact 3: This is about the money, not safety. It is estimated that somewhere around 50 million traffic tickets are issued each year in the United States. Assuming an average ticket cost of $150.00, the total up front profit from tickets probably approaches 7.5 billion dollars, much of which finds its way into local government coffers. But this is not just a bonanza for cities and counties, the insurance industry gets a nice payday as well. Speeding tickets result in insurance surcharges (typically at least $300 over a period of three years), which means adding somewhere around 7.5 billion dollars in profit for insurance companies.

Why is this profit? Because there is no statistical correlation between the occasional speeding ticket and being an unsafe driver. It is little wonder why insurance companies love strict enforcement campaigns. It is the perfect cover for making more money, while taking no additional risk.

In total, we’re talking about somewhere around 15 billion dollars annually from tickets for government agencies and insurance companies. That’s more money than several states take in from all taxes. Worse still, that total doesn’t even include the money that “traffic schools,” attorneys, radar-detector manufacturers, and scanner producers make. In short, speeding tickets are a huge business, and one that puts courts and law enforcement in a direct conflict of interest with their duty to uphold the law impartially.

The police enforce laws that result in direct benefits to police agencies and personnel. Judges hear cases in which a “guilty” verdict has tangible financial rewards for the court and courthouse personnel. In fact, the courts typically pocket almost half the cost of the average traffic ticket. How interested in justice is the average traffic court judge when his salary and benefits are directly tied to making speeders pay up?

No other class of “crime” is as profitable for state and local governments as is that of traffic tickets. Worse, from the standpoint of many businesses, local government encourages traffic enforcement practices that target travelers to support local government services and to reward government employees. Out-of-town drivers are less likely to show up to court dates, and more likely to pay quietly through the mail.

How addicted are governments to speeding ticket revenue? There has been anecdotal evidence over the years that the answer is, “Very!”

The most flagrant example of a city living off the RADAR gun is Pendergrass, GA. According to the Athens Banner-Herald, the city took in about $558,020 in fines in 2006, enough to pay the police department’s $312,636 budget and then some. Pendergrass only has 491 residents. That’s a speeding ticket haul of $1,136 per resident!

This is by far an extreme example, but most people have assumed the principal at work in Pendergrass is the same in most localities. There was just never any verifiable proof of that fact – until now. A new study published in the Journal of Law and Economics, has found statistical evidence that local governments use traffic citations to make up for revenue shortfalls. As tax revenue decreases, the number of speeding tickets increases.

Study authors Thomas Garrett, assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Gary Wagner from the University of Arkansas Little Rock, examined 14 years of revenue and traffic citation data from counties in North Carolina. They found that the number of traffic citations issued goes up the year following a revenue drop.

"Specifically, a one percentage point decrease in last year's local government revenue results in roughly a 0.32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year," Garrett and Wagner write.

That may not seem like much, but it is statistically significant and equates to a lot of money at the local level. Which just goes to show, speeding enforcement isn’t about safety - it’s about revenue. Worst thing of all – the study also found that even after a revenue downturn ended, the rate at which speeding tickets were written did not decline. The new level of tickets will be with us forever, unless something changes.

If the primary motivation for traffic enforcement were safety, instead of revenue, then this statistically significant correlation would not exist. The bottom line – anecdotal evidence is correct. Speeding tickets are about making money, not about saving lives or preventing accidents.

Fact 4: Focusing on Speeding increases other crimes. In 2002, the city of Detroit issued a total of 126,007 traffic tickets. Last year, that figure grew to 245,249– a 94 percent jump. Why? Revenue is falling in the depressed area, so the local governments have been leaning on the police chiefs to make up the shortfall. As Utica (a suburb of Detroit) Police Chief Michael Reaves to Detroit News, “When I first started in this job thirty years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement. But if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues. That’s just the reality nowadays.”

With more cops watching the roads to rip off motorists, what does that do to overall law enforcement? Well, in Detroit here are the results:

While Detroit police focused on increasing the number of traffic tickets by 94 percent, every category of serious crime increased significantly. The total number of murders, rapes, robberies, assaults and burglaries increased by 19,370 — a 56 percent jump — between 2002 and 2006.

The economy is declining, which makes economically marginal people more inclined to commit crimes. At the same time, police are spending their days hauling down middle class parents in minivans for the sake of government revenue. If police are hiding in the bushes with RADAR guns to make a buck for the government, they are not available to deter or investigate crime. As the economic malaise worsens, I expect more and more cities to replicate the experience in Detroit.

So what to do? Business has to wake up! It is time to shake up City Hall. If your local government is throttling your business by running speed traps, then you have to get armed with the facts and get serious about protecting your customer base. If people sit home and refuse to get out and travel, then huge sectors of our economy will sink as a result.

It is up to our businesses to push police officers out of the tax-farming racket, and back into their proper role of protecting the lives and property of citizens. It is also up to our businesses to force their local governments to live within their means. If tax revenues are down, then the government has to contract as well. Trying to keep municipal spending artificially high at the expense of the traveling public is counterproductive. Better to reduce expenses and wait for better days, than to make the situation worse by turning cops into ticket machines.

If your county, city, or town has a RADAR gun revenue addiction, then you need to get serious about putting the local officials on a 12-step recovery program. Your customers will thank you for it, as will your bottom line. Especially in this age of the Internet and instant communication, a bad reputation is something your locale really can’t afford.

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. His latest project is an ticket services that lets fans use an interactive seat map to find the best deals to any concert, sporting event, or theatrical performance. You can contact him here .

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 [Speeding Tickets Are About Money, Not Safety]

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