Legislator Proposes Altering Guidelines for Speed Limits

In a bid to make the streets safer for pedestrians, an Orange County assemblyman Wednesday proposed a sweeping revamp of the controversial method California uses to set speed limits.

The bill by Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) would make pedestrian and bicycle safety the “primary factor” traffic engineers consider when determining how fast vehicles may travel. It also would make challenging speeding tickets in court more difficult.

State law now requires that limits be set at or near the speed traveled by 85% of motorists. It also gives drivers wide latitude to contest tickets if they can prove that they were traveling at the average speed of traffic.

The existing rules have been criticized by some traffic safety groups and police, who say that they allow motorists to set their own speed limits and get out of tickets.

A Times computer analysis of state accident data found numerous streets in Santa Ana where speed limits were raised despite high pedestrian accident rates. In Orange, officials raised the speed limits on 75% of the streets in 1992. Over the next four years, according to the Times analysis, the total number of serious accidents rose by 21%.

Correa said he introduced the bill in response to the situation in Santa Ana, which has the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California. If passed, his bill would affect drivers statewide.

“It’s a law that injects into the formula some common sense,” he said. “Speed limits should not be based solely on the speed of cars.”

Correa’s bill would for the first time establish posted limits as the “absolute” rate that motorists must follow regardless of traffic flow.

Police said this change would allow them to more strictly enforce speed limits. Santa Ana police traditionally allow a buffer of about 10 mph before handing out tickets, because judges sometimes throw out borderline cases.

“It certainly would benefit the police,” said Sgt. Raul Luna, the Santa Ana police spokesman. “We would be able to write more violations that in the past we were unable to write because there was always a gray area in the court over what was the safe speed.”

Some traffic engineers questioned the effectiveness of Correa’s proposal and said they doubted that it would alter either driver or police behavior.

“It won’t change the speeds at all unless there’s a black and white [police car] sitting there,” said Dick Weaver, a former deputy director and chief engineer at Caltrans.

Weaver and others fear that the plan could prompt communities to set arbitrary speed limits that would make violators out of the majority of drivers.

John Farris, a Santa Ana-based attorney who specializes in traffic cases, predicts that many police will continue to enforce only the most egregious cases. He called the proposal unfair because many motorists who drive over the speed limit do not pose a safety risk.

“If you’re driving safely and over the speed limit, now you’re a criminal,” he said of the legislation.

But others expressed strong support for the bill, which they said fundamentally would shift traffic policy from ensuring smooth traffic flows to protecting people.