In my area the cops always do speed traps catching drivers on the way down bridges and also in a few areas that the speed goes from 65->45 very quickly. It’s a part of a highway then goes right back to 65.
These areas have almost no accidents and honestly are very safe if you did speed.
Yet the areas that people street race and constantly speed in very busy areas have zero speed traps. While the majority don’t speed in these areas they have the most fatalities and speed related accidents.
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Because cops, like any other employee, are mostly comprised of people trading their time for a paycheck and will do what their employers want from them with some extra effort for things they are passionate about in that job.
Many law enforcement agencies keep track of how many traffic stops you make, so the cops that don’t have a passion for traffic enforcement will try to meet whatever expectation that is, be it 10 stops a week or whatever.
The brass doesn’t care how egregious the offense is, they just want +1 Stop (unless recent media attention has called out the agency for lack of X enforcement, then they will ramp up X enforcement until the public moves on). Speed is incredibly easy to detect and objectively prove in court, so that’s the offense that gets stopped the most.
There are a few things going on here. First, it is true that some officers go to what they call “honeypots” to write easy tickets. Most agencies don’t have “quotas,” but there often is someone looking at your monthly numbers, and a place where the speed limit changes is a good place to quickly write half a dozen citations and get those numbers up. However, it would be a mistake to assume this is happening every time you see a speedtrap in what seems to be an incongruous place. Consider:
Have you really collected and analyzed the data when you say there are “almost no accidents”? Maybe the police know more than you do.
Your assessment of where accidents are happening may not be taking cause into effect. Accident hot spots for speeding are a bit different than total accident hot spots.
Maybe slowing down traffic at that low-accident spot still impacts a higher-accident spot a few miles down the road.
Traffic enforcement does not have to correlate to specific crash hot spots for it to have an effect. It has a general deterrent effect on the practice of speeding no matter where it is conducted.
Overall, it’s a bit arrogant to think that you know better than traffic engineers and the police that an area is “honestly very safe if you did speed.” If that’s your perception, perhaps that area is the perfect area FOR enforcement.
Because it keeps the road safer any deterrents to speeding are helpful in the long run. So when people see police there, that’s not necessarily hiding. Is them letting you know that these roads are being observed and sometimes they are hiding but a lot of the time they want to be seen. Just the presence on highways make the roads safer for all.