A Place On The . Net

Excellent points Tim.  I completely agree that low speed doesn't always create the safest condition.

Entrapment would be to put a 25 MPH limit on a long hill with a 5 or 6 % grade and then place traffic cops at the bottom.  That is also a conspiracy since you know it takes more than just the cops to make that happen.  Rare for sure. 

Law enforcement really has become for-profit.  The problem is that it's flawed logic. 

A couple of years ago I sat in a Sandpoint city council meeting while they discussed with their chief of police (yes, lower case) how they could increase revenue from his department.  They discussed various methods before drifting from law enforcement to parking enforcement.  Their focus was on maximum revenue, not efficient and fair parking for the public downtown.  They had no shame, they were not embarrassed to discuss this publicly.  They felt they had a right or some obligation to profit this way.

Consider your average mall parking lot.  The focus of the mall is to profit.  They do this by leasing space to merchants.  Merchants profit by selling goods.  All this takes customers and customers need a safe place to park.  Customers won't come to a mall if it's not safe, and if the customers don't come then nobody makes money.  Speeding in a parking lot is unsafe.

If you were a city government, your solution to the mall parking lot would be to hire enough officers to patrol the lot at all times.  You would set a speed limit and then instruct your officers to measure speed and issue citations to anyone traveling in excess of the posted limit.  You would generate income this way.

A business man won't even bother to tell you that you'll never cover the expense of the officers and their equipment.  A businessman won't bother telling you that this solution will reduce the profit of the mall overall.  The businessman won't bother because he's somewhere else, making profit in ways the city council can't grasp.  The businessman has already had speed bumps installed in the parking lot.  Those speed bumps accomplish the goal of safety quite well and everyone involved get on with more important things.

Everyone in a town profits, just like everyone at the mall, when conditions are safe and parking is readily available.  Our towns are just like big malls.  I'm not saying that we need to put up speed bumps everywhere.  I am saying that everyone (city council, cops, businessman, customer) needs to re-examine their goals and stay focus on what really is important to them.  If speed is an issue, there are ways to limit speed through intelligent design and logic.  Writing tickets doesn't accomplish anything but pissing off the customer.