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Public service to our members
Traffic-trap suburbs

(GunNews) –  Not only is Chicagoland a dangerous place to live or visit, home of the highest local sales taxes in the nation, and the nation’s top city for traffic enforcement cameras but it also sports some ticket-happy suburbs that will gleefully reach into your wallet if you’re not perfectly legal in every aspect of your motor vehicle operation.

The Chicago Tribune recently ran a series on Chicago-area suburbs with extraordinarily high traffic ticket production.

As a service to readers, here are the five suburbs you might wish to avoid:

Tiny little Bull Valley (McHenry County) is on top (or bottom):  Bull Valley’s cops write a lot of folks tickets, especially for speeding.  How many?  About 43 times, on average, as many as the average Chicago cop writes.

Park City (Lake Co.) is next.  They only ticket 22 times as many drivers, per officer, as Chicago cops, and you’ve got a one in twenty chance of getting off with a warning.

Carol Stream (DuPage Co.) is a bad place to be if your seatbelt isn’t on.  They write more tickets for seat belts than they do for speeding, but they still write, per officer, 21 times as many tickets as your average CPD cop and over 40,000 in 2009 alone.  Yeah, that’s just shy of 110 per day, including Christmas.

McCook (Cook Co.) isn’t on the menu at McDonalds, but if you’ve got equipment violations (lamp out, bald tires, cracked windshield, or a loud exhaust), you won’t be lovin’ it.  McCook loves equipment violations because they can keep more of the fine money in their community than they get with standard moving violations.

In Evergreen Park (Cook Co.), getting pulled over is just the start of the tale of woe for almost one in ten cars stopped.  Their PD loves to go fishing for criminal violations, then impound the car.  For $600 (plus towing and storage fees), you can then recover your ride.  Think you’re a law-abiding citizen?  There’s a lot of obscure offenses that can land you without wheels in Evergreen Park.  It’s the Evergreen Park revenue enhancement program and it nets that town roughly $600,000 a year, adding to the monies they net from writing almost 20,000 tickets (in 2009).  That’s about twenty times the ticket-writing rate as an average Chicago cop.

If you want to read more about this and read about some tales of woe, click here…

3 thoughts on “Chicagoland: Traffic-trap suburbs.”
  1. Evergreen Park writes every ticket they can, on Chicago “elements” to keep them in aware that their Chicago style antics are not welcome in Evergreen Park. Oak Park does the same. Both towns border on Chicago neighborhoods that are not as nice as they are, by any standard. Is this a racial thing? No one is stupid enough to say that out loud, but when you have a decent neighborhood, and don’t take steps to keep it that way, everyone loses. I have worked in agencies where cops are ordered by higher ups to have zero tolerance on the punks, gangsters, and local problems to “encourage” them to move elsewhere. So what? if we dont push back? they “encourage” us to move even further out to live in a quiet, low crime area. This is how it’s done in America now.

  2. Well, Ralph, my advice would to move completely out of the People’s Democratic Republic of Illinois as soon as you possibly can. That’s what I like about Texas – we’re the ONLY state that can legally secede from the Union without congressional approval.
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  3. What do you expect from Chicago, Illinois and their corrupt Cook
    County Democratic Machine? Like Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ): our worst
    ever president ,and the vile Earl Warren Supreme Court from the
    era of the 1950’s and 60’s ,this metro jungle maintains their
    legacy, heritage, and historic tradition of deceit, crookedness,
    graft, and political corruption! And along with that odious
    tradition anti-gun civilian disarmament policies aimed at the
    innocent honest gun owner. I could go on but I still endorse JPFO,
    Inc. at http://www.jpfo.org. Enter into JPFO,’s search engine: “Dial 911
    and Die!”

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