Bill Would Put Brakes on State’s Rising Speed Limits

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

The legislation, authored by Assemblyman Lou Correa, would make pedestrian and bicycle safety the “primary factor” traffic engineers consider when determining how fast vehicles can travel. It would also make it harder for drivers to challenge speeding tickets in court.

Currently, state law requires 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 they were traveling at the average speed of traffic.

The existing rules have been criticized by some traffic safety groups and police, who say they enable 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 its streets in 1992. Over the next four years, according to the Times analysis, the number of serious accidents rose 21%.

Correa (D-Anaheim) said he introduced the bill in response to the situation in Santa Ana, which has the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California. But if passed, his bill would have far-reaching implications for drivers across the state.

“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.”

A key goal of the legislation is to tighten what some police officers consider loopholes that enable speeders to successfully challenge tickets. Under existing law, motorists can argue that the speed traveled, even if above the posted limit, was safe for the existing conditions.

Eliminating the Gray Areas

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 enable them to more strictly enforce speed limits. Santa Ana police, for example, traditionally allow a roughly 10-mph buffer before handing out tickets because judges sometimes throw out “border line” 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,” he said.

Some traffic engineers, however, questioned the effectiveness of Correa’s proposal and said they doubted 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 also fear 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 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 would fundamentally shift traffic policy from ensuring smooth traffic flows to protecting people.

Though the current law does enable traffic engineers to consider high vehicle accident rates when setting speeds, critics say the law does not provide a similar exemption for pedestrian and bicycle safety.

If passed, the legislation would require engineers to give primary consideration to vehicle accident rates and road conditions not readily apparent to drivers.

“We want to take back the streets,” said Ryan Snyder, a spokesman for the California Bicycle Coalition, adding that the legislation is important to turn back the “endless rounds of speed limit increases.”

“Current laws are making our neighborhoods and communities less safe and less livable,” he said. “Without the legislation the practice continues.”

The Times analysis found speed limits continued to rise in parts of Santa Ana--even in areas with major safety problems. On one stretch of West 1st Street, for instance, the city raised the speed limit from 35 to 40 mph even though it had the most pedestrian fatalities in the city.

About 50 streets in Santa Ana have seen their speed limits rise since 1987.