California Highway Patrol cracks down on speeding with 24-hour statewide ‘Maximum Enforcement Period’
If you tend to speed on the freeway, you might want to take your foot off the gas. California Highway Patrol is cracking down on speeding drivers statewide during a 24-hour enforcement period.
Eyewitness News Reporter Leo Stallworth did a ride-along with CHP Officer Marissa McIntire as she spotted speeding drivers during the crackdown on Tuesday.
Leo watched as McIntire stopped a driver going approximately 82 mph on the 134 Freeway — nearly 20 mph over the 65 mph speed limit.
The driver was hit with a speed ticket as CHP floods highways statewide for its 24-hour “Maximum Enforcement Period” (MEP). It began Tuesday at 6 a.m. and continues through Wednesday morning.
“Today, we have a Maximum Enforcement Period where all available CHP resources are going to be out on patrol, looking for speeders,” said Sgt. Dan Keene with CHP. “We’re doing this because speeding has been an issue in the state of California. Last year alone, we wrote over 491,000 speeding tickets, and those were the cause of multiple collisions, actually over 110,000 collisions that resulted in fatal injuries and serious injury crashes.”
Preliminary data showed that in those 110,000 crashes, over 400 people were killed and 68,000 were injured.
“Speeding continues to be one of the leading causes of serious and fatal crashes on California’s roadways,” CHP commissioner Sean Duryee said in a statement. “When drivers choose to exceed safe speeds, they reduce their ability to react and increase the risk for everyone on the road. Slowing down is one of the simplest steps that drivers can take to protect themselves and others.”
The crackdown comes as CHP rolls out a new program with the DMV called Forwarded Actions for Speeding Tickets (FAST), designed to severely penalize drivers caught going over 100 mph.
“Going in excess of 100 mph, it does get sent to the DMV for a process of possibly getting your license suspended,” McIntire said.
Leo caught up with one of the drivers who was pulled over during Tuesday’s crackdown.
“I literally saw the ABC7 post on Instagram, sent it to my husband,” Nicole said. “I should have been a little more thoughtful.”
Fortunately, Nicole was let off with a warning instead of a ticket.
What’s the cost of getting a speeding ticket?
Some drivers tell Eyewitness News they can’t afford speeding tickets because of gas prices.
“We’re definitely employing methods to go ahead and conserve on gas,” Paula, a motorist, said. “I’ve never been pulled over, so I don’t know what a big, fat speeding ticket looks like… maybe, like two miles back, they were already pulling over people.”
“I don’t want a ticket,” Cleve McWright, another motorist, said. “I don’t even want to deal with Highway Patrol, so I try to stay, you know, under the speed limit.”
Besides the cost of the ticket itself, another reason to avoid getting a speeding ticket is that it could increase your auto insurance up to $1,500 over three years, according to the platform Off The Record, which helps drivers fight traffic tickets.
The initial fine for a single speeding ticket could be $150 to $200.
The founder of Off The Record says a single speeding ticket can raise your insurance premiums 20% to 30%, and the average increase is $582 more each year.
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