Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Some Bonne Terre Missouri (a small town about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis) residents wanted to change the speed limit of Church Street from 30 mph back to 20 mph. Residents believe the lower speed limit would slow down the many speeders (it won't).

The nearby city of Farmington offered Bonne Terre the use of a safety radar, but discovered the unit was broke. Farmington than offered their speed counter (measures number of vehicles, speed and weight), but unfortunately the counter was also broken (nice try but no dice).

Bonne Terre police finally just manually ran radar one day for 14 hours. A total of 548 vehicle speeds were measured, the average speed was 28.68 mph (below the 30 mph speed limit). Vehicles traveling above the 30 mph limit were usually traveling 35 mph of less. Only a few vehicles were traveling faster than 35 mph. Based on the data (14 hours one day) it seems the public perception of speeders on Church Street is in error. Perhaps more data gathered automatically by a safety radar would provide more accurate (different?) results (a larger sample collected over more time will yield more reliable statistics).

CopRadar