Just The Ticket : Traffic School Lets an Erring Driver Avoid a Fine, Keep the Record Clean and Maybe Even Learn a Few Things

By 7:30 on a glorious Saturday morning, a line of 217 people stretches like a boa constrictor through the parking lot of the Newport Beach Courthouse. What could they be here for? Tickets for a Springsteen concert? The opening of a new housing development? A car giveaway?

Not exactly. Most of these folks look as if they would prefer root-canal surgery to what they are about to endure this morning--and this afternoon--but their dentists are all off playing golf.

The crowd is here for traffic school, the down side of Southern California’s love affair with the automobile.

Into almost every driver’s life, some tickets must fall. For motorists not charged with such serious violations as drunken or reckless driving, there’s the option of traffic school--if local judges agree. Motorists who haven’t been to school within the previous two years in the county, in most cases, can attend an eight-hour school and get the ticket dismissed.

But forget what you may have heard about traffic schools taught by comedians, traffic schools that offer you gourmet dining interspersed with recitations of the vehicle code, traffic schools that are cheap. Some of those schools exist in Orange County, but in general, if you live in this county and get your ticket in this county you can’t go to that kind of school.

Instead, you go to a traffic school class given at any one of five courthouses in the county, taught by an instructor hired by the Academy of Defensive Driving. The academy, based in San Juan Capistrano, does not employ comedians (at least not professionals), preferring instead district attorney’s office investigators, police motorcycle officers or Highway Patrol officers.

Still, faced with the choice of paying more than $100 for a speeding ticket or $45 for traffic school, 4,000 to 5,000 motorists each month head for classrooms in the county, according to Tom Hale of the Academy of Defensive Driving.

An even bigger motive than the cash savings is the knowledge that the graduate of the school has the infraction wiped off the record.

That means the insurance company doesn’t find out about that little matter of a 90-m.p.h. excursion through a 25 m.p.h. school zone, the sort of thing that tends to encourage insurance companies to raise their rates--which already stop just short of demanding a motorist’s first-born child as a premium.

So at 8 a.m.--when the courthouse doors are about to open--the line has nearly doubled. Latecomers scour the parking lot in unsuccessful quests for spaces, pressing the pedal to the metal and screeching off into the street to hunt for somewhere else to leave the car, driving with an abandon that got them the ticket in the first place.

Scott Fountain knows what it means to be late lining up for traffic school. On two previous Saturday mornings he got in line at the court in Westminster at 7:30 a.m., only to be turned away at the door for lack of seating. The two months a motorist has to complete the school are about to expire for Fountain, so he made sure he got here early this time: 5:55 a.m.

A veteran of past classes, Fountain said they “tend to give you some useful information most of the time.”

Still, he said: “They spend a lot of time telling you stuff you already know. It’s a little bit demeaning. There may be people who need that basic information, but a lot of stuff they tell you, if you don’t know, you shouldn’t have a driver’s license.”

Bob Stansell has a different view of the school. “I like it,” he said. “It’s fun. I have a good time doing it.”

Sure he does. For one thing, Stansell teaches the class. For another, he met the woman who is about to become his wife when she was a student in his class.

Stansell opens with a warning to his students: “Whether you deserved the ticket or not is irrelevant. Forget it. It’s history, it’s past tense, it’s wasted energy to sit around and bore your friends and family for the next five years talking about this ticket.”

Stansell has begun to give the 400 minutes of instruction required by the Department of Motor Vehicles--which licensed him to teach the class--without putting the “pupils” to sleep, but while also covering the curriculum required by the DMV.

“The rear-view mirror that we have,” he says, “it’s not just for putting makeup on. . . . What about you guys? Shaving in the car? That is gross, disgusting. . . . Then you brush it off onto your secretary’s desk when you get to work.

“Reading the newspaper? Who has time to read the newspaper and have a cup of coffee before you go to work in the morning, right? So you read it on the way to work. In your car, on the freeway, reading books. I even saw one person reading the Bible one morning. And I thought, hmmm, maybe he knows something I don’t know.”

The moral: “You shouldn’t be doing anything but driving a car when you’re driving it.”

Stansell draws on his experiences as a police officer--in Livermore, Alameda County, and then in Inglewood, where he worked before joining the Orange County district attorney’s office--to dramatize his lessons.

So does Ben Hittesdorf, a motorcycle cop from Garden Grove.

“Chapman and Haster. How many people drive that at 5 o’clock?” Hittesdorf asks his class in the Fullerton courthouse on the last of their three Wednesday nights.

“Coming from The City Drive to Haster, is that not bumper to bumper for the entire two miles? . . . People will actually get on there from Lewis Street, by the Crystal Cathedral, and drive down the two-way left-turn lane and pass three intersections and a dozen driveways to get to Haster Street and make a left turn. Like it’s their lane. And there’s always a dozen more people that will follow the dummy.

“Remember I told you the first week that I stopped eight cars at one time? This is where I did it. I waited until they all came down the street, and I’m watching them: one, two, three. . . . They all had to stop at the red light to make a left turn. I got off my bike, sashayed up to them, knocked on their windows--scared the hell out of all of them--took their licenses and said, ‘Follow me.’ And when the light turned green they all paraded into the 7-11 parking lot there on the corner. I wrote eight tickets. I didn’t have to work for the rest of the day. I was set.”

The moral: In a two-way left-turn lane, where drivers going in opposite directions pull over to get ready to make their turn, do make the first left you can, into a driveway or onto another street. Don’t just drive in that lane for blocks and blocks.

The instructors say they think traffic school is a good idea, reminding offenders of the rules of the road, providing updates on new traffic laws, and giving warnings against continuing to do whatever they did that got them into the school in the first place.

The DMV said traffic schools have been around since the 1950s and now number nearly 400 across the state, with 2,100 classroom locations. Last year nearly 800,000 drivers attended the schools. Yet how valuable they are to anyone except the motorist ducking the insurance company is open to question.

Studies have indicated that the driving records of traffic school “graduates” are no better than those of the average driver. A DMV study last year concluded that motorists who went through traffic school and got their tickets dismissed “pose a greater traffic safety problem” than motorists who were convicted and had the violations put on their record.

“This fact alone is sufficient cause to question a practice which allows such offenders to circumvent license control actions and avoid higher insurance premiums,” the study said.

Without commenting on the specific DMV study, Ken Daily, who is public affairs officer in the San Juan Capistrano CHP office and who teaches traffic school as well, said he thinks all drivers should attend traffic school every five years, whether they’ve received a ticket or not.

“Because so many new things happen . . . I don’t understand how they expect the public to keep up on it,” Daily said.

He said all instructors have films to illustrate points in the DMV’s nine-page curriculum, which covers topics such as driving distractions, stress and anger, stopping distances, vehicle maintenance, alcohol and drugs.

But Daily said some of the films are so outdated they show 1953 Fords and 65-m.p.h. speed limits in urban areas (it’s still 55 in California except in the boondocks). So he dresses up his presentations by drawing his own cartoons and by injecting as much humor as he can.

“It makes the time go faster, so it’s not boring,” Daily said. “It’s bad enough with what you have to teach, so you try to make it interesting.”

Daily said he has thrown people out of his classes for sleeping. Once he ejected a man who “was just crazy, crazy as a loon.”

But despite the temptation to sleep in class--especially after lunch--a surprising number of traffic school attendees said the classes are interesting. None of more than a dozen interviewed described them as boring, although those who have gone through the sessions before--and knew what they were in for this time--were more muted in their enthusiasm.

Sandra Limacher of Costa Mesa, who showed up at 6:30 a.m. for the 8 o’clock Harbor Court class, said she had a “great” teacher at a traffic class several years ago, and was enthusiastic about Stansell’s presentation as well.

“I think this is a wonderful way to get (the ticket) off your record,” she said.

Like 99% of the people in the class, she freely admitted her guilt: “I deserve it. I was going 75. . . . I was in a hurry to get home. (Because of the ticket) it took me longer to get home, obviously.

“I have no complaints. I’m not upset. I’m just thankful that they have traffic court. As my husband said to me, though, ‘Make sure you don’t get a ticket on the way.’ ”

ORANGE COUNTY MOVING VIOLATIONS CITED, 1987

BY COURT JURISDICTION

Court Violations CENTRAL ORANGE COUNTY MUNICIPAL COURT 102,788 (includes Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin, Villa Park and surrounding unincorporated areas) HARBOR MUNICIPAL COURT 95,965 (includes Balboa, Corona del Mar, Costa Mesa, Irvine, John Wayne Airport, Lido Isle, Newport Beach, Santa Ana Heights, and surrounding unincorporated areas) NORTH ORANGE COUNTY MUNICIPAL COURT * 135,338 (includes Anaheim, Brea, Buena Park, Fullerton, La Habra, La Palma, Placentia and Yorba Linda) SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY MUNICIPAL COURT 65,926 (includes Capistrano Beach, Dana Point, El Toro, Laguna Beach, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano) WEST ORANGE COUNTY MUNICIPAL COURT 121,881 (includes Cypress, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Stanton and Westminster)

* Includes citations issued for mechanical defects (such as a broken tail light), the exact number of which could not be determined.

BY THE CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL Speeding tickets:53,449 Drunk driving: 7,097 Following too closely: 3,172

TICKETS FOR MOVING VIOLATIONS BY CITY, 1987

ORANGE Tickets written by motorcycle officers: 17,914 Tickets written by car officers: 7,504 Total tickets issued: 25,418 Five streets with the most citations Chapman Avenue: 4,782 Tustin Avenue: 2,526 Katella Avenue: 1,185 Glassell Street: 1,152 Taft Avenue: 1,024

GARDEN GROVE Total: 8,327 Five intersections with the most citations (number of citations issued not available) Brookhurst Street and Westminster Avenue Harbor Boulevard and Trask Avenue Garden Grove and Harbor boulevards Chapman Avenue and Harbor Boulevard Brookhurst Street and Chapman Avenue Breakdowns Juveniles: 871 Adults: 7,456 Males: 6,374 Females: 1,953

IRVINE Total tickets: 26,075 *Hazardous citations: 21,787 **Top five intersections with the most citations (number of citations issued not available) Jamboree Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway southbound off-ramp Culver Drive and Walnut Avenue Culver Drive and Deerfield MacArthur Boulevard and Bonita Canyon Drive. Culver Drive and the San Diego Freeway southbound off-ramp. * violations that are considered potential accident risks. ** for March, 1987, through March, 1988.

FULLERTON Total number of tickets: 23,950 No other information available .

SANTA ANA PD Total tickets: 36,683 No other information available.

LAGUNA BEACH Total tickets: 9,669 The top three areas with the most violations Laguna Canyon Road: 2,964 North Coast Highway: 2,421 South Coast Highway: 2,049