Strategies justified for highway safety

It's imperative police agencies take the steps to slow people down and make our roads safer.

Are you sure that construction worker on the highway is truly concerned with the roadwork?

Or is he more apt to be clocking your speed as you drive by?

These days you never know. And for those of us not speeding, that's a good thing. The police are cracking down and, in the end, it should make for safer roads.

As Daily Herald staff writer Ames Boykin reported Sunday, the same is true for motorists who think nothing of running a red light. More and more communities are investing in police cameras perched on traffic signals. A new state law allows for such cameras on state roads.

While some communities can see a steep increase in ticket revenue -- Chicago netted $20 million last year for red light violations -- the biggest reason to support these cameras is to get people to drive safely. Ask any runner, for example, and they'll tell you of stories of needing to quickly get out of the way of motorists who never bothered to look if anyone was in the crosswalk before zipping through a right on red.

And yet, as Boykin reports, just as police think up new ways of nabbing unsafe drivers, those same drivers are finding products that will help them elude detection. They can buy gadgets that use a global positioning system to alert them to traffic cameras or a detector that claims to pick up new police laser guns. Or they can buy a special spray that creates glare and hides their license plates from the cameras.

A proposed law would outlaw such products just as a new state law bans plastic license plate covers that induce glare. We support those efforts, despite claims from the manufacturers that the cameras make mistakes. We agree with supporters who say any mistakes from the cameras can be worked out.

"Everyone's trying to do something," state police Master Sgt. Luis Gutierrez said of these new products. "If they're obeying the laws, that's not something they need to be worried about."

Given examples in recent years of chronic speeders thumbing their nose at traffic tickets and eventually causing fatal accidents, it's imperative police agencies take the steps to slow people down and make our roads safer.

Buffalo Grove police, for example, have posed as construction workers and as motorists with a broken down car to nab speeders. We agree with Buffalo Grove Sgt. Scott Kristiansen who told Boykin such efforts are effective deterrents.

"When the people know that we're out there and they know we might be dressed as construction workers and solicitors, we've found that people tend to slow down," he said.

And that is the appropriate goal that needs to be achieved.