Reply to Why does the DC Council (Charles Allen) not want the MPD doing any traffic enforcement?

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Reply to "Why does the DC Council (Charles Allen) not want the MPD doing any traffic enforcement?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Enforcement is a pretty inefficient way to make things safer and also can be racist.

[b]Building the roads so that people drive at safer speeds is far more effective.  That can mean things like narrower lanes.[/b]

If you've ever driven on a wide straight lane with few stop lights, you naturally go faster.  I just drove on a country back road that had a 60 mph limit, but I was at my limit around 40 mph for most of it because it was narrow and didn't have a safe shoulder to provide margin.[/quote]

Translation: We're going to take away car lanes, turn them in bike lanes and that will make traffic for drivers so terrible that no one will be able to move, let alone speed. Talk about inefficient. [/quote]

FWIW - the vast majority of people advocating for bike lanes also want increased enforcement. it comes up a lot. more in the context of red light cameras and speed cameras, and booting cars with tickets. I’m not sure what police officers can do about truly reckless drivers on city streets in the moment- a high speed chase would not be safe either. [/quote]

+1 - police wouldn't be allowed to chase anyway per DC's policy.

I do support the recent proposal to dock drivers' license points for traffic/light camera infractions. Also believe DC should boot the heck out of these cars wherever and whenever they can.

I honestly don't care about the $ or who is affected by camera tickets. The simplest thing to do is drive slower and stop fully. There's an easy alternative to excess cost of tickets which is to just mandate that the car owner must attend driver training once they hit x number of offenses, or lose their license, or even be able to be arrested if say, 10 offenses in 3 months and did not attend mandatory driver training by x date.

Yes, sometimes an issue can be road design, but let's be honest, a big issue is drivers who are completely egregious no matter what. I've seen drivers on tiny Capitol Hill roads with all the safety precautions of bump outs, stop signs, corner posts, still deliberately run every freaking stop sign in a row as well as red lights (literally just this morning actually right after dropping my kid off at elementary school). What do we do about drivers like this? Police try to pull them over and they take off, now police are chasing this driver during elementary school dropoff on neighborhood roads - also not a great situation. Or police don't bother to chase because of DC chase policy. Whenever I see a driver like that, if I can, I grab a photo of their license plate and 99% of the time, that driver has many camera infractions. Find a way to hold them accountable.

It's also drivers who do not bleeping understand how to legally stop for stop signs (as evidenced by some privledged idiot who tried to contest a stop sign camera somewhere in DC a few months ago by taking video of themselves not actually completing a legal stop). A simple campaign to show people what a legal stop is. Make a video ad, poster, etc. showing how you can hit and kill a small child by not legally stopping. Show faces of actual children who died because someone didn't legally stop.

I'm ranting, but I'm a parent and get extra angry and emotional every time I hear/see a story about yet another DC pedestrian, often enough a kid, hit by an idiot driver while DC does nothing about it.

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