Brake Time

Los Angeles police are preparing to launch a major crackdown on speeding in the San Fernando Valley, where broad boulevards often become irresistible raceways for impatient drivers.

Traffic accidents caused by speeding more than doubled between 1997 and 1999, according to statistics compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley Traffic Division. Last year, 78 people were killed in Valley accidents, most of them in high-speed crashes.

“We cannot continue to allow people to drive at the speeds they’re driving,” said Sgt. Dale Turner, the Valley traffic supervisor. “What we’ve seen over the years is that warnings don’t work--citations do.”

Armed with new radar and laser equipment, police will hit the streets this weekend with a get-tough policy toward speeders.

Motorcycle officers already scour the Valley with hand-held radar guns, focusing on 20 accident-prone stretches, such as Sherman Way, Roscoe and Victory boulevards, and Vanowen Street. Police issued more than 1,200 tickets on those four roads alone--the four most abused by speeders--over a two-week period in January, according to LAPD records.

Now, the department is casting a much wider net.

The Valley Traffic Division plans to outfit 19 patrol cars with new radar and give motorcycle officers a total of seven high-tech laser devices, whose narrow beam can pinpoint individual vehicles more precisely than radar, Turner said.

Radar, the acronym for radio detecting and ranging, measures the Doppler shift, the change in frequency of a radio wave when it bounces off a moving object.

Laser speed guns calculate how long it takes a brief pulse of infrared light to travel to the car and back, determining its distance. Then the gun pulses again and measures the new distance. The change in distance, divided by the time, reveals the car’s speed.

And it’s not just traffic cops who will be zapping drivers from afar. About 28 radar guns have been handed out to regular patrol officers in the five Valley divisions, boosting traffic enforcement efforts among the rank-and-file.

All the new hardware means police can devote more time to patrolling residential side streets, said Officer Jack Jung--known to his colleagues as the “Radar Czar” of the Valley Traffic Division.

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After 25 years of listening to lame excuses from speeders--and showing up at gruesome car accident scenes--Jung has scant sympathy for the lawbreakers.

“A reduction in speed,” he said, “equals a reduction in accidents and fatalities.”

Karen White, who lives on Firmament Avenue in Encino, welcomes the tough approach. She said she sometimes has trouble backing out of her driveway because the tree-lined street has become a bustling shortcut for commuters heading to the San Diego Freeway.

“It’s an extremely serious problem,” White said. “What they’re doing is speeding down the street to get to the 405. It used to be a regular, quiet suburban side street, but it’s being used as a thoroughfare.”

Councilwoman Laura Chick of Tarzana, who has proposed several measures to reduce speeding, said she hears constant complaints from residents about the problem.

“Despite the fact that we have too much traffic congestion on our streets, people are still managing to be in a great hurry,” Chick said. “We’ve got to get people to slow down. People are dying because other people are driving unsafely.”

Standing alongside Vanowen on a recent afternoon as cars whizzed by, Jung squinted into the viewfinder of his $3,200 laser gun, pulled the trigger and checked out the evidence: 49 mph in a 35 mph zone.

“Female driver, short hair, multicolored shirt in a two-door, light-brown Nissan,” he said, as he sized up the offender, with the rapid-fire speed of a camera shutter. All that detail helps police make their case in traffic court.

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Jung didn’t give chase this time. But this weekend will be another story.

“It’s going to be zero tolerance,” Turner warned. “We are not going to tolerate people exceeding speed limits in the Valley.”