Blacksburg just can't seem to get it right when it comes to speed limits and speed enforcement. One doesn't know if it is by design or general incompetence.
The town cries poor about funding for the police department and claims there isn't enough money to pay for all the positions the department needs to be at full strength. The meals and lodging tax was bumped up last year to add more police officers to the department.
OK, so the extra officers aren't always where they need to be when they should be -- at least some people feel that way. A parent purchased his own radar gun and uses it along Toms Creek Road to alert drivers that they are exceeding the 25 MPH speed limit through the school zone. This shouldn't be a problem, since the speed limit on Toms Creek Road is only 25 MPH any way. This was reported in the Roanoke Times on Friday, May 1 in the Current (see http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/blacksburg/wb/203083 ). The response from the town police department, according to the article, when asked to do something about speeding in the school zone, was to send an officer "once or twice a month to the road to patrol during school hours."
The town has no shame about this, though. The day this article appeared, the police department showed it is dedicated to keeping speed in check in critical locations around town -- NOT! At 9 p.m., one of Blacksburg's finest was running radar on Old Glade Road -- surely a dangerous piece of road if there ever was one. The car was hidden away across the road behind the Volume II Bookstore, ready to catch drivers as they roared from Prices Fork Road to Glade Road on that short section of 25 MPH street. As long as I've lived here, I don't believe I've seen or know of any accident on that street. But someone decided it was more important to put an officer running radar there on a Friday night than to run radar in an active school zone anywhere else in town more than once or twice a month.
The article also mentioned that the town will look at the possibility of installing permanent signs that will tell drivers what their speed is as they go by. If so, one hopes the town does a better job than was done on Southgate Drive. The sign for traffic traveling from Airport Road is OK (for registering cars going downhill). It is the sign for cars heading from campus that is pretty useless. In addition to registering the speed of cars coming off a short but steep downhill section of street, there is a curve in the street and overhanging tree branches that block the view of the speed until a driver is right at the sign. If this is supposed to slow down drivers (and appease the neighborhood residents, who don't like the through traffic on Southgate), it is a failure.
The town has already installed a number of three-way and four-way stops on Airport, Southgate, and Edgewood to disuade through traffic. Money was spent to put in sidewalks and traffic-calming curb work to narrow the traffic lanes on Southgate to reduce speeds. The radar speed signs are almost overkill. If the police department can't spare the officers to protect the children walking to and from school, then moving these signs to a school zone sooner instead of later would seem to be a better use of tax dollars than just to make a handful of Southgate Drive residents happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment