Two Texas Cities Hit Hard with Toll Road Speeding Tickets
When it comes to getting a speeding ticket, a News 8 investigation shows there are two North Texas cities where the odds are against you.
Over a one-year period of time and on a total of just six miles of road, the two communities wrote a combined amount of $775,000 in tickets.
Why so many tickets? Here’s a hint; they say it’s not about the money.
News 8 collected speeding ticket data from all the cities along the Bush Turnpike and the Dallas North Tollway.
Between the cities of Dallas, Plano and Frisco, there is 22.5 miles of toll road. During a recent one year period on that stretch of road, those cities wrote a combined 100 speeding tickets.
However, Irving, which has four miles of toll road, wrote nearly 2,000 tickets. And then there is the city of Garland. While it has a tiny two-mile stretch area on the Turnpike, it wrote more tickets than any other city, almost 2,500 of them. Garland collected almost $400,000 in revenue.
“From the police departments standpoint, no,” said Joe Harn, a Garland Police Department spokesperson, when asked if the tickets were about money. “Ours is about safety.”
News 8 shared findings with attorney Everett Newton, who defends motorists at traffic court.
“It’s kind of like if you go fishing, you go to the pond where the fish are,” he said. “You don’t go fishing where there aren’t any fish.” And here’s what makes the Bush Turnpike a good pond, the speed limit is set artificially low. “I think it creates a really, really bad situation, potentially for drivers who drive on that stretch of roadway,” Newton said.
In a series of reports, News 8 has shown that the North Texas Tollway Authority did not follow state guidelines for setting speed limits. Transportation sources say within the year the NTTA plans to raise the current speed limit on the Bush Turnpike from 60 to 70. Meanwhile, they have been set at 60 for years.
“I don’t believe the speed limits have, in any way, set a traffic trap for motorists,” said Sherita Coffelt, the NTTA’s spokesperson.
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