Tickets from Above

TCC's Speeders' Excuses Contest
Ticket Fighting Strategies 

"There ain't no end to doin' right," quips the demented Union cavalry officer in the classic Clint Eastwood movie, "The Outlaw Josey Wales." This could serve as the motto of the speeding-ticket factories established in most states of this fine land of ours.

Increasingly over-the-top methods are being employed to nab people for violating traffic edicts—including the use of airplanes, of all things—often at tremendous cost and, ironically, palpably little gain.

Here in Virginia, where I live, the state police operate Cessna 182s and a speed-calculating device called VASCAR to rain tickets from above, so to speak. Lines are painted at measured intervals on the highway; the time it takes for a car to travel from one line to the next can be used to figure the vehicle's speed. The cop in the sky then radios a ground unit, describes the car, and the chase is on.

The gendarme like the idea because it's more stealthy than ground-based radar traps. "Drivers can't see us up there," noted Virginia state police pilot Larry Hanna. "It's much more effective than working radar on the ground."

The use of airborne surveillance is a growing phenomenon: A total of 40 states have enacted laws permitting the use of aircraft to monitor and enforce speed limit laws.

While some critics decry the Big Brother in the sky aspect of this deal, another serious objection is simply the profligate wastage involved. According to the Virginia State Police, it costs $70 per hour just to fly the little airplanes—more if you figure in the maintenance and upkeep. The actual figure is probably a lot closer to several hundred dollars per hour in fuel, pilot salary, maintenance and upkeep. A single Cessna costs $30,000 to $50,000 or more to buy.

What are they doing up there?

And yet, the grand result of all this hullaballoo has been an average of less than one ticket per hour, according to Virginia's finest—this using teams of three to six officers on the ground working in concert with the airborne Officer Friendly.

Not a very good return on the investment.

Backers cite the "deterrent effect” brushing aside cost/efficiency questions. "Just knowing that we have a pair of eyes in the sky will slow motorists down," explains Virginia State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill.

This is reminiscent of the "rolling roadblock" tactic that was popular for awhile among the gendarme. That business involved several police cruisers driving abreast with their cruise controls set at exactly the posted limit, which was then 55-mph. The angry conga line of motorists stretching behind them as far as the eye could see did not matter. It had the desired "deterrent effect."

It's sad all around that traffic safety enforcement has de-evolved into a cynical—and thinly veiled—program of revenue collection and motorist harassment. It's bad for the motoring public, which must endure being fleeced on frequently specious or trumped-up grounds. And it's bad, ultimately, for law-enforcement officers, who are coming to be viewed by broad swaths of the public as little more than gun and badge-toting tax collectors. This undermines public respect for the police and the otherwise valuable role they play in society—a very unfortunate and dangerous thing—and makes a mockery of legitimate traffic safety enforcement.

Using aircraft to track dangerous felons is one thing; at that level, bleeding the public treasury a little is in the interests of public safety. But using planes to hassle "speeders," who more often than not have simply transgressed an arbitrarily set figure with no actual relationship to the safe operation of a motor vehicle, is an egregious and unconscionable misuse of public resources.

But then again, there "ain’t no end to doin' right."