It doesn’t take long for vehicles traveling north on South Memorial Drive from 61st Street to get moving.

Cresting a small hill and urged along by a four-lane road with no stop lights for a mile, the 40 mph speed limit can come quick.

Vehicles on that road travel at speeds that easily average 50 mph, said one woman who works on South Memorial Drive. “I see excessive speed. I see drag racing,” said the worker, who asked not to be identified. “They are coming down the hill and they just aren’t watching their speed.”

But someone is.

A six-block stretch of South Memorial Drive between 51st and 61st streets ranks as the No. 2 spot for Tulsa police to write speeding tickets during a four-year period ending in May. The 2,321 speed-related tickets written in that area are among the 100,000-plus speeding citations written by Tulsa police in the last four years.

The No. 2 ranking for South Memorial Drive is among the findings in a Tulsa World analysis of traffic citation data made available to the public by Tulsa police as part of a federal racial discrimination lawsuit involving the Black Officers Coalition.

The data, which dates to 2004, is maintained on the TPD Web site and includes information about thousands of citations issued by police, including the race and date of birth of those cited, as well as where the violation occurred. The analysis excludes speeding citations that resulted in an arrest.

But while that portion of Memorial Drive keeps police busy, anyone who has driven the Broken Arrow Expressway near downtown enough times has probably seen where police are the busiest. Nestled in the median between the 1300 and 1700 blocks of the expressway, police stake out the area and snare motorists exceeding the 55 mph speed limit. Over the past four years, the near-downtown stretch of the Broken Arrow Expressway ranks as the No. 1 area in the city for TPD speeding tickets, with 3,739 citations issued during the past four years.

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