Bristol Police Begin Crackdown on Speeders
Earl Neikirk/Bristol Herald Courier
Police Officer Donnie Pierce uses a radar gun Friday to clock drivers on Holston Avenue, where the speed limit is 25 mph.
BRISTOL, Tenn. – After hearing a number of complaints about speeders on Holston Avenue, local police have beefed up their patrols of the popular cut-through – and issued more than a dozen traffic citations in the past six months.
“Any time we get citizen complaints about speeding in any area of the city, we do extra traffic patrols,” said Capt. Matt Austin, who supervises the Bristol Tennessee Police Department’s patrol division.
Holston Avenue is a perfectly straight two-lane road that starts on the Volunteer Parkway near the Bristol Applebee’s. It parallels the Volunteer Parkway and runs into Holston
Drive, a curvy street that reconnects with the parkway beside First Tennessee Bank.
Combined, the two streets form a two-mile shortcut that gives drivers a chance to skip three stoplights on the parkway and shave minutes from their trips. People who live along the route claim their neighborhood is rife with speeders and they are worried for their children’s safety.
“It just seems like zip, zip, zip,” Holston Avenue resident Amy Greene said. She and her husband put a fence in their front yard to keep their 3-year-old daughter from wandering in the street.
Greene’s concerns about the speeders gained new attention May 18 when the Sullivan County Commission unanimously approved a resolution urging city officials to do something about the speeders. The resolution asked them to “lend support” to the neighborhood’s residents and was sponsored by County Commissioner Bart Long of Bristol, who is himself a Holston Avenue resident.
“This is a serious problem,” Long said as he presented the resolution to the Bristol City Council last Tuesday. “It has been for many years. Anderson Elementary is right in that area and we need to get this traffic slowed down before somebody gets hurt.”
On Friday, City Manager Jeff Broughton said he and Long had discussed the Holston Avenue situation before the May county commission meeting. Broughton said he did not know about the speeders before his meeting with Long, but has since assigned his staff to study the problem and come up with ways to correct it.
“Once we understand it better we’ll figure out what we can do,” Broughton said. He also said the city is conducting traffic counts on the road so they’ll know how many vehicles travel the street and how fast.
City police officers are already working on the problem. The Holston Avenue corridor is an “area of concern” for the police department when it comes to traffic enforcement, Austin said.
Other areas of concern include East State Street, Old Jonesboro Road and the Volunteer Parkway. Austin said the department periodically assigns extra officers to patrol those areas at different times of the day.
The extra patrols have yielded some results.
Between Jan. 1 and May 31, police officers issued 14 traffic citations to drivers who were pulled over on Holston Avenue or Holston Drive, Communications Manager Virginia Smelser said.
The tickets include five for speeding, where in each case drivers were traveling at least 15 mph over the speed limit. The group also includes five tickets for running a stop sign and one “financial responsibility” citation that Smelser said was probably given out following an accident.
While those numbers might seem high, Smelser and Austin said they do not paint a full picture of Holston Avenue’s traffic problems.
Smelser said the list includes only drivers who were pulled over on Holston Avenue and Holston Drive. It does not, she said, include drivers who might have been speeding on one of those streets but were pulled over on one of the corridor’s cross streets, such as Vance Drive or Cedar Street.
Austin said police have issued at least another four speeding tickets to drivers on those streets in the past week and those tickets did not show up in the report.
As for dealing with the speeders, he said, the best way to solve the problem is through “education.”
“A lot of it is getting people to know that we are enforcing the speed limit,” Austin said. People will change their behavior, he said, once they realize they will get caught speeding on Holston Avenue.
– (276) 645-2518
Advertisement
Reader Reactions
Not to belabor the point, but quality speedcheck signs can be set to go to a blank display above a certain speed. This eliminates concern over joyriders trying to register high numbers on the display. Secondly, if there is room for a speed limit sign, there is room for a radar speedcheck sign. Policing traffic may be their job, but studies show that speeding resumes as soon as traffic patrols leave an area. 24/7 patrolling is clearly not an option. Check the studies. Radar speed signs are being used by a growing number of cities because, in applications such as this, they provide the ideal means of slowing cars and increasing pedestrian safety.
I agree that stopping speeding is expensive..as far as actually needing an officer…but that is what police are for. Enforcing laws and speed limits are laws which need to be enforced. The idea of the radar things is not really that great (of course only my opinion), I have seen some try to see just how fast they can go and then see their speed, go down the street, turn around and come back and do it again to see if they can go any faster. People know their is no consequence to their speed being recorded. Also, on the streets we are talking about here there isn’t room on the roadside to place one of these. These are small two lane backroads that have just enough room for two cars. Definitely not enough room for one of those machines.
And on the newscast the lady mentioned speed bumps…can you imagine hitting a speed bump at the posted speed limit of 25? I dont’ think so.
To me..again only an opinion, the posted speed limits on Volunteer Parkway are too low for the size of the road. This is a four lane roadway that has speed limits that mostly range from 30-35. That is too slow for that road. If they would allow people to move a little faster on that road they wouldnt’ jump off on the back roads to speed. It takes FOREVER to go anywhere on Volunteer Parkway..and I regularly take Holston Avenue to avoid it.
Stopping speeders and increasing pedestrian safety is good. But it doesn’t have to cost the city so much money. Studies show that live patrolling by traffic cops is one of the most expensive traffic calming solutions used. And once the patrolling stops, the speeding immediately resumes.
If the city is really serious about solving this problem long-term, they should do a bit of research. Turns out that traffic calming technologies such as radar speedcheck signs - those devices that tell passing drivers how fast they are going - are just as effective and require no live patrols. According to studies, they are particularly effective around school zones and neighborhood streets.
Radar speed signs also slow cars while freeing up our police force for other duties - and they do it without the need to ticket our citizens.
If city officials are interested, they can find a comprehensive list of links to over a dozen government-sponsored traffic-calming studies on www.informationdisplay.com - a site sponsored by industry experts. A nice overview of various methods used to slow cars can be found at www.stopspeeders.org.
Let’s do the reseach and come up with an effective, long-term solution that we can afford.
How about the police driving the speed limit. When was the last time you saw one doing less than 10 mph over the limit. that includes all police dept. city, county, and state. they all act like they have no rules.
So, do I have to become a county commissioner to get speeding stopped on MY road?
Holy Cow! 14 citations in 6 months?! Now that’s a crackdown. Let the hammer fall!
Advertisement