Radar: It Takes Courage

California remains the only state in the nation that refuses to let its highway patrol use radar to help enforce speed laws.

The main barrier is the state Legislature, which rides blithely along with the trucking lobby on the issue, ignoring mountains of evidence that radar can help law enforcement weed out speeders who are the direct cause of so many injuries and deaths.

Fortunately, the Legislature does not have the last word on radar everywhere in the state. And now another unincorporated area in Orange County, this time North Tustin, has decided that radar is worth a try and has won approval from the county supervisors for a contract with the patrol for the use of radar to help reduce speed on surface streets.

Radar, which the California Highway Patrol also is authorized to use on selected roadways in several other counties, was introduced in Orange County two years ago in Mission Viejo. The CHP enforces traffic laws in unincorporated areas, and the Mission Viejo Municipal Advisory Council was attracted to radar by reports of the reduction in speeding, traffic accidents and deaths during a pilot program in Orinda, in Northern California. The confidence wasn’t misplaced.

Despite population growth and the increased traffic that it brought, officers using two radar units on the community’s seven major streets were able to reduce speed-related traffic accidents 14% and injury accidents 12% last year.

That impressed North Tustin, which also has a specific speeding problem that seems ideally suited for the radar enforcement that the patrol has shown it can so effectively provide.

We hope that one day soon the Legislature will be impressed, too. There are other dangerous roadways in Orange and Los Angeles counties (as well as in the rest of the state)--Pacific Coast Highway and Ortega Highway, to name but two--where traffic injuries and deaths could also be substantially reduced if the Legislature displayed the foresight and the political courage that local county boards have shown.