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…
Comments are closed.