WISCONSIN [ JG ] With gas prices high and the number of available rickshaws woefully low, the total leisure miles travelled by Wisconsinites has plummeted. Likewise, the average speeds of freeway drivers are lower, and as a result, traffic fatalities are at an all-time low too.
The logical conclusion then, is that the amount of manpower the State Patrol has to dedicate to traffic enforcement should also decline. That would make sense if the purpose of highway policing was safety (as is the quaint but popular notion). If that were the case, patrols would increase or decrease with the corresponding volume of traffic, like the number of lifeguards at a pool in the summer, or prostitutes in Denver during the DNC convention.
But despite a demonstrably declining need for more enforcement, stepped-up patrols are precisely what we’re getting. Why? Well they’ll cite “safety“, but that hardly makes sense against the statistics.
If the number of patrols goes up when traffic increases, and up again when it decreases, it hardly seems likely that the number of highway cops has any correlation to traffic volume (and thus, traffic safety) at all. So what is the reason for a concerted effort to issue more citations?
In a word: revenue.
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