Gloria Addo-Ayensu
Director
Fairfax County
Health Department
Traffic Laws Enforced Unevenly, Inadequately
As rudeness and bad conduct proliferate on our roads, it is useful to ask whether "law enforcement" is doing all it can to keep us safe. Several recent encounters with the process confirm my long-standing impression that it is not.
A large flatbed truck sped through a red light and broadsided the front end of my car as I was moving slowly into an intersection. The truck driver had numerous recent violations on his record. He professed innocence, claiming that I had run the light. The investigating officer thought otherwise, however, and an uninterested bystander who saw the accident testified forcefully that the trucker was at fault. He was quickly convicted and fined the awesome sum of $100.
Afterward, the investigating officer told me that the judge probably had not seen the trucker's entire record. Evidently, the trucker was able to have the points already on his license reduced by taking a driver education course between the date of the accident and the trial.
Exactly two years later I was cited for speeding by a Fairfax County police officer conducting one of those quintessentially American enterprises, the Speed Trap. I had moved out to pass someone driving well below the posted limit. My father long ago taught me to pass quickly, avoiding the moving roadblock.
I paid the $141 fine without demanding trial, however. I think the authorities must count on such reluctance to challenge their rarely perfect radar stops. Why else would my penalty be so much greater than what the truck driver received?
I commuted from southern or western Fairfax County into the District for more than 30 years. Over the last 10 to 15 years, I have observed a minimum of three to four drivers violating red lights every day. Each day I have also observed tailgating, drivers weaving in and out of lanes at high speed, often without signaling or even looking, and of course those infamous passive-aggressive louts who go slow in the passing lanes, make right-angle turns on interstates, stop for no apparent reason and persistently create dangerous situations that may, and often do, cause accidents.
I cannot recall ever having seen such violators stopped by the police, however. Rather, it has been my observation that traffic "law enforcement" in our area focuses to a disturbingly high extent on the speed trap and on HOV enforcement, activities that, coincidentally, are efficient sources of revenue.
Speed traps do not catch weavers, tailgaters, light crashers, or the reckless, the inattentive and the incompetent. Often they trap drivers exceeding speed limits set artificially low for the relevant road solely for the purpose of trapping "speeders."
Who in our area cannot identify many locations that are harried by traffic police routinely at the end of every month? Who in western Fairfax County has not seen state police posted at Dulles Toll Road booths to discourage scofflaws rather than in their cars to apprehend violators? How many have observed Maryland State Police walking onto Interstate 95 to cite speeders? Is the risk they create to human lives justified by the revenue they collect?
And what about the 'game'? Why wasn't that recidivist trucker who nearly killed me fined more heavily and his license suspended? Must the authorities wait until he actually kills someone?
