In one of the earlier tax meetings held by the county recently, some members of the public voiced the opinion Jasper had annexed portions of Highway 515 so the city could set up a speed trap and gather revenue from fines.
It’s true that with annexation of most of the four-lane the city gains any revenue produced there from fines on drivers. That’s regardless of which agency makes the stop: the city police or the Georgia State Patrol. And the revenue comes at the expense of the county, because the county received that money before, whatever was generated on the stretch of highway before the city annexed it.
But all told, the annexation was certainly about bigger issues than traffic fines. It was about sewage and infrastructure. But that and related cooperation, or lack of same, between city and county is a story for another day.
This week we’re calling for more speed enforcement by both the city police and the state patrol on the four-lane in Pickens County.
It’s got nothing to do with revenue. It’s all about safety for those of us who have to cross that road.
The problem on Highway 515 isn’t a speed trap. It’s unchecked speed. Witness the fiery crash that killed a mother and daughter on the divided highway earlier this month.
It happened where Highway 515 intersects Antioch Church Road, a crossing like most on 515 with no traffic light and motorists powering through at speeds in excess of 65 miles per hour.
As one person familiar with the accident stated, you don’t have many wrecks on that road that don’t kill or seriously injure.
Anyone who has to cross the four-lane knows a misjudgment of the speed of oncoming traffic can be fatal.
It’s true most of the highway’s crossovers command adequate lines of sight. You can see someone coming a long way off. The problem is the number of vehicles approaching and the speeds involved. You can see them coming a long way off, but with road congestion, you may not get a good chance to pull out for what seems like an eternity.
Regardless of the cause of the latest fatal wreck, the extent of injuries is clearly affected by one factor: speed. Something needs to be done to lower the average speed all along the route. The idea that there is already a speed trap on Highway 515 is laughable.
If there is a speed trap on Highway 515, it must be the most slipshod operation in the history of law enforcement, a sieve having holes so big a tractor trailer might fall through.
Even an untrained eye can see vehicle speeds on the four lane are too high, ridiculously above limits of 55 miles per hour south of Highway 53 and 65 miles per hour a little farther north.
Nobody drives that slow. A recent test drive revealed you create a bottleneck if you drive 55 mph approaching Jasper from the south. And while 65 mph seems a reasonable highway speed, you will still be passed more often than you overtake other traffic in the section from Jasper to Talking Rock.
If the city does own some sinister moneymaking plot to stop everyone out there from speeding, we’d say “Get to it.” If officers happened to produce some extra income for the city, that would be a nice by-product. To slow the flow is the main thing.
Speed traps are never popular, but they are infinitely better than death traps. |
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