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Although not much was said, this summer ticketing activity was high maybe to prove to us not all the troopers were stationed at the airport or guarding the entrances to the tunnel.
Speaking of the tunnel: As politicians talked about increasing the tolls to pay for repairs caused by their shoddy project management, the tunnel walls continued to leak all around them. But not to worry, Inspector Romney was on the job.
"The lieutenant governor and I crawled up in there over the weekend," the governor reassured us in July, at a press conference about the ceiling panels over the Ted Williams.
Well, we were busy too. NMA campaigned against for-profit red light camera programs in Springfield and Saugus, and against placement of new illegal STOP signs in Brookline and Dover.
Meanwhile, the legislation okayed a bill naming a portion of Route 28 in Reading "Tolerance Road" (H 4971). The original bill designated all of Route 28 as "Glory Road," but the Transportation Committee changed the name. The legislation also approved a new law that gives campus police officers the power to ticket for violation of motor vehicle laws at Massachusetts public colleges.
They also debated whether to increase the driving age for teenagers by a year while an 80-year old woman crashed her car into the elevator in the lobby of her Wellesley building ("Apparently, she was trying to park in the visitor's area," said the security guard on duty), a 23-year-old woman walking on the sidewalk in Newton was struck and killed by an 84-year-old woman who lost control of her vehicle, and in New London, CT, the Democratic challenger for US Senate and several of his campaign workers were in the crowd that a station wagon plowed into. ("He panicked," said the mayor about the 89-year driver who was not injured himself.)
Then in July, the former senator and astronaut John Glenn (age 86) was hospitalized after causing an accident in Ohio by failing to yield to on-coming traffic. All kinds of politicians called the hospital to wish him a speedy recovery, but none of them filed any bills or amendments proposing changes to licensing age, elderly drivers' testing or to their car insurance discounts.
Finally, after the legislative session closed for the season Attorney General Tom Reilly proposed a massive traffic safety crackdown in Massachusetts that would include more surveillance cameras at traffic lights, mandatory sobriety checkpoints, night curfews for teen drivers and free rein for cops to pull over motorists who don't wear seat belts.
Cameras would snap shots of license plates, insurance companies would tell drivers where to get their cars fixed and drivers would face roadblocks, as law enforcers would conduct an unspecified number of "highly visible sobriety checkpoints." Besides curfews for teenagers and new seat belt measures, Reilly's plan also would increase to 8 the age of kids who would be required by law to sit in booster seats while in a moving car.
Barely a month later, the MBTA announced they are equipping 10 busses with surveillance cameras and microphones. Somehow their lawyers "forgot" that in 2001 the police prosecuted (and the State Supreme Court upheld) a case against a motorist who audio-taped his conversation with the officers during a traffic stop. This ruling however didn't made felony wiretapping laws apply only to private citizens - those same laws are still applying to government agencies as well.
"It's creepy," said an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're moving toward a surveillance society."
From my own experience living in a Communist society let me assure you we're already there. There is no practical difference between the safe and secure future the government officials envision for all of us and the police state I escaped from.
And meanwhile the number of motor vehicle accidents in Boston has declined by more than 3,500 since 2000, and the number of fatal accidents in the city dropped from 23 to 12 in a year (compare that to 48 homicides so far).
But not all is lost. In over 15 years of dealing with motorist issues, this summer was the first time I personally heard from a motorist who complained that police gave him a "failure to keep right" ticket. Wow!
Ivan
NMA MA Coordinator
And now a word from John Carr, MA State Activist:
A couple years ago one of MassHighway's engineers noticed an unreasonably low speed limit on Route 20 in Sudbury near the Wayland line, did a traffic study, and recommended that the speed limit be raised from 30 to 40. This change would have reversed 20 year old reduction from 40 to 30. In the 1970s and 1980s speed limit reductions were routinely made without regard for traffic safety or engineering standards.
The law says posted speed limits are supposed to be justified by engineering studies. MassHighway's official speed limit policy says there is no possible justification for posting a speed below 40 under the conditions found on that section of highway. The study found that lowering the speed limit to 30 without cause actually made traffic faster than where the limit had been left at 40.
Despite the proof that the speed limit reduction did not slow traffic, when the town heard that the speed limit might be raised they called their state senator and representative, who forced MassHighway to keep the illegal speed trap.
The speed limit on Route 3 from Burlington to New Hampshire continues to be the "temporary" 55 mile per hour speed limit imposed on the old highway in 1974. Last we heard, MassHighway's engineers didn't know how to do their jobs so they were asking the State Police for advice.
I was driving through Hopkinton recently and noticed the 35 mile per hour speed limit posted on South Street was awfully slow. So I stopped at town hall and asked to look at their file of speed regulations. The legal speed limit on South Street is not 35, but 40 and 45. And these speeds were set in 1974, before the road was improved to handle EMC's new corporate campus.
Last year MassHighway finally raised the speed limit on Route 9 in Natick, decades after they lowered it so they could appear to do something in response to an accident. The speed limit increase severely impacted the Natick police department's favorite speed trap at the Speen Street interchange. So they found a new angle. There's an advisory 35 mile per hour speed where the lanes shift due to some construction. Natick police decided to enforce that suggested speed as if it were the speed limit.
John Carr
NMA MA Activist
8/06
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