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In Georgia you can see the path I-75 and I-16 take through the southern half of the state. 16 is notorious for speed traps and other shadier stuff. Including r
by wil421 7y ago
In Georgia you can see the path I-75 and I-16 take through the southern half of the state.
16 is notorious for speed traps and other shadier stuff. Including road blocks on exit ramps with drug dogs waiting to sniff cars. They bait people into getting off at the exits by leaving fake signs about upcoming road blocks. When College kids were moving or getting out of school they’d be out in full force.
Sadly my Dad grew up in one of these towns. The fines were the only way to keep parts of the town alive.
- BubRoss 7y agoWhy were the fines the only way to keep parts of the town alive?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wil421 7y agoThe police lacked funding and the population of the towns were falling. If they raised taxes the very limited business could leave. The state did do something to prevent speed traps[1], not sure if it worked or passed. Sheriff is a political job and even more so in small towns. It’s just as much of a mayor type job as it is a policing one. Their entire school system had less students than my high school in metro Atlanta. [1]https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/speed-trap-bill-passes-house/avKnLqri4i6olLeBZhiFrN/ https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/spee...
- BurningFrog 7y agoI doubt the town would die without the fines. They're surely the most convenient way to collect money thought.
- wil421 7y agoI should rephrase it as “the town was dying and needed money” rather than it would die without the money.
- munificent 7y agoBecause small towns in the US are dying. Manufacturing and ag are down, services and tech are up. The former provided jobs evenly spread throughout the US where raw materials and good land were. The latter encourage consolidation in denser metro areas. A local government is an economic entity too. It takes in income from some set of people and distributes services in return. Taxes mean getting income from the residents, which in turn means those residents need to be acquiring money from outside of the area to compensate for that. When jobs are dying, that money stops coming in. Traffic fines let a small town extract money directly from people outside of the city, which means it places no burden on the citizens receiving the services. I'm not saying this is morally justified, but that's how the system works economically. These small towns are in a really rough spot. Many services are not fully elastic and can't arbitrarily scale down. It's not like you can say "the fire department only puts out fires between 3 and 6 PM." A sewer line that only goes halfway to a house is not 50% useful. Below a certain level of wealth and density, a city simply can't sustain the services it needs to provide to its citizens. Their options are: 1. Take in money from larger government organizations. State and federal funding can keep these cities alive. This is how, for example, they're able to still provide mail service, because it's the US Postal Service. With this, basically the larger metro areas are supporting these small towns out of duty to the greater good. 2. Extract money from people living outside of the area directly. That's what this article is about. 3. Disincorporate entirely. This does happen sometimes, but obviously this has a lot of downsides. Actual humans do live in these places, and these cities have long histories. Times change and some things do naturally go away, but there is a material loss when it happens.
- bksenior 7y agoIf you've driven between LA and SF you'll most likely be very aware of Kings County. A notorious speed trap that requires you to be on site to contest their questionable infractions.
- mc32 7y agoIf you’re in the “Jefferson” counties of northern California it’s not unusual to have cops waiting at the bottom of an off ramp for those drivers who practice “California rolls” at their stop signs. Locals seem to know better.
- xfitm3 7y agoAnd then you hire a lawyer who "has a good relationship" with a judge
- SamReidHughes 7y agoI never knew that was a speed trap. How do they enforce it? It seemed really easy to see cop cars, as long as you slowed down for bridges.
- lunias 7y ago"keep parts of the town alive" Which parts? The police force? Seems to me that if your city doesn't bring in enough tax revenue to support a police force then you'd opt to have a volunteer police force. What's the situation with fire departments in these towns?
- wil421 7y agoThey are likely volunteer only fire departments.
- mieseratte 7y agoAny specific examples of this? I've been taking I-16 pretty routinely for most of my life, never heard of or ran into anything resembling a speed trap let alone bait. Admittedly, I have some friends with a story about Georgia highway patrol / local PD setting up a roadblock off an interstate exit right by a Phish concert.
- wil421 7y agoYes I went to Georgia Southern briefly and had friends who graduated from there. A couple of our fraternity bothers got busted by the road block ahead trick. Maybe it was around Dublin. Metter was/is a speed trap but I’ve only been through once in the past 5 years. Here’s a list from the AJC[1]. I can vouch for Doraville being a trap. [1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ajc.com/news/local/traffic-tickets-some-cities-use-interstates-cash-registers/PULjG07fwkFbQUadT4YGvL/ampexp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ajc.com/news/local/traffic-...
- mieseratte 7y agoNow that I think about it a bit more, I do recall Dublin being an alleged hotspot, but to me it's the same way I've heard Jacksonboro, SC is a hotspot. Transit it a half-dozen or so times per year but never manage to see or otherwise run into actual trouble. Everyone I know will tell you it's a hotspot, but never has actual accounts of it. Metter was and remains the family pitstop, and has never been trouble and I can't recall seeing any in the 10+ years that I can remember driving. Of course that's really only in the I-16 interchange area as opposed to transiting the town itself, perhaps further into the depths of Metter awaits a townie with a quota. I wonder if police hotspots are a sort-of hipster problem, by the time you hear of them they've since moved on to greener pastures.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bigred100 7y agoI wonder if it wouldn’t be better for such towns to die. I don’t know if there’s any reason to live in a place where you don’t really have a means to do anything productive or (apparently) provide for yourself.
- wil421 7y agoIn a county where 35% of households are under the poverty line you don’t really have that kind of choice. My father was able to move because he got into Georgia Tech.
- siruncledrew 7y agoBasically: - Town is poor and economically desolate. - Town gets money from being legally petty to try to stay afloat. - Everyone who gets fines hates Town; wants to avoid it. - Town is poor and economically desolate. Not a prime long-term strategy. If the Town is already on life-support, then short-sightedness is their de facto choice if the Town going belly-up is their other option.
- wil421 7y agoYea if you think like a rational person. They don’t care what happens after they leave only the appearance of things while they are in office.