Arkansan Town Issues Too Many Speeding Tickets, Has to Stop for an Entire Year

While there are no official figures to explain just how many speeding tickets are too many for a small town, the issue faced by Menifee Police is linked to a law in the state of Arkansas, which is meant to discourage speed traps as cash cows. Said law limits traffic tickets to a maximum of 30 percent of a city's total revenue.

According to THV 11 News, an audit of the town's finances in 2020 has revealed that it had over $120,000 from traffic citations, which is almost half of the town's revenue. Police and city officials claim that the audit was analyzed wrongly, as it included data from previous years.

Moreover, the town's Mayor claimed that he instructed the police chief not to write tickets for anything less than 10 mph (ca. 16 kph) over the speed limit, but that request was ignored.

Since there is no proof of that discussion anywhere, we can only mention who claimed that it happened. It is unclear how many of the tickets that were issued were for these kinds of offenses and how many were for heavy speeding.

Now, before you get any crazy ideas that will take you north of Little Rock, please remember that the town can still have county police, as well as state police, to keep an eye on speeders. Going too fast on a public road through a town – nonetheless, not only puts you and others at risk, but is also dangerously stupid.

It does not matter how much you are in a hurry; if you hit someone with your vehicle, your plans for the day are as good as canceled, regardless of wherever you were off to.

Mind you, driving 10 mph (ca. 16 kilometers per hour) over the limit would involve going faster than you should around a town, and doing so will increase stopping distances to more than what would be safe for other road users.

Stopping distances increase exponentially with speed, not at the same rate, because the vehicle keeps going forward while your body is thinking of what you have seen ahead and preparing for its reaction.

It is just physics, and you cannot eliminate this reaction time from any human, no matter how talented they may be. Yes, we are referring to stopping distances here, not braking distances, because the latter is smaller than the former, but it does not account for reaction times.

At 30 mph (ca. 48 kph), your stopping distance is estimated at 75 feet (ca. 23 meters). Driving at 40 mph, the stopping distance increases to 118 feet (ca. 36 meters).

As you can see, the 10-mph (16 kph) difference in speed leads to increasing the total stopping distance by 43 feet (ca. 13 meters), which is more than twice the length of the average automobile.

For reference, the minimum width of a crosswalk is just six feet (ca. 1.8 meters), but school-related crossings are 10 to 15 feet (ca. 3-4.5 meters) wide or even wider. Now, go back to the above paragraph and see how much driving 10 mph over the limit would overshoot the crossing.

Just for the sake of presenting facts, a velocity of 60 mph (ca. 97 kph) will lead to a total stopping distance of 240 feet (ca. 73 meters), out of which approximately the width of a basketball court is “spent” while your brain tries to figure out what is going on, and what you should do about it.