Rumors

Could it really be that a senior Durham Police official told a neighborhood association group that the department is not able to enforce Durham's traffic laws and speed limits due to manpower and prioritization issues?

I've only spoken to one person who was at the meeting (although it's someone who i've come to trust implicitly), but if that in fact happened, it's troublesome on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.

(ADDING): My source indicates that the senior police official referred to above was more indicating that the problem lay within the courts. IE - it may not be worth DPD's time and manpower to write these citations if the courts are going to allow them to be bargained down to equipment failures, or if the violators are going to simply ignore the citations, knowing they'll never be tracked down anyway. While this mitigates somewhat the statements that prompted this rant, i don't think it solves the problem or even points the way to a successful solution. The DPD's job is to enforce the laws, including traffic laws. They need to write the citations. If it turns out that the court system for collecting those fines and/or throwing chronic violators in jail is broken, that's a completely different problem.

First, speeding, especially on neighborhood surface streets, is so endemic that the city is unable to fund all of its traffic calming requests. The waiting list for speed humps, for example, is so long that the conventional wisdom regarding their effectiveness has had time to evolve while some neighborhoods are still waiting for their installation. The huge Club Blvd. project near Oval Dr. Park is supposed to be a model for similar traffic calming measures in other parts of town, but it took years to find the money for that project, and there's not much left for other projects. The perceived need to slow down traffic on our surface streets is so great that over 1200 Durham residents have signed on to the PACE Car program, voluntarily and publicly pledging to drive within the speed limit at all times in the city. Believe me, we don't do that because we like making sure we leave five minutes earlier to be on time for all of our appointments.

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People who work on pedestrian and other, non-automotive transportation issues, like to talk about the three Es: Education, Engineering, and Enforcement. In our town, education about things like pedestrian rights-of-way in crosswalks is virtually non-existent. Similarly, the engineering of many of our roads (and i'm thinking about N. Duke St., Guess Rd., Roxboro {north and south} as examples) encourages speeding while discouraging pedestrian activity. That pretty much leaves enforcement as the sole means of making any sort of difference in the current, unacceptable, situation.

Second, though, is the incredible insensitivity of making that statement to a neighborhood association group. Our neighborhood associations and PACs are the heaviest concentrations of concerned, committed, and invested citizens. It's been the work of these people, as much or more so than any capital investment from the city, that has made Durham such a great place to live. You simply can't come into a group like that and say that their concerns are not going to be addressed. It's getting pretty damn frustrating to hear from department after department that they can't carry out their jobs because they're understaffed and underfunded. You know, a great many Durham residents have lived in other towns and cities across the US. We've seen, with similar budget constraints, that they've figured out how to enforce traffic laws and zoning regulations. I'm not asking for every pothole in the city to be fixed in 24 hours, or every broken streetlamp to be repaired the same day it's reported. But it's simply unacceptable to hear time and again from department heads that "We'd love to implement that program, or solve that problem, but we don't have the personnel." We read abot the same troublesome landlords leaving their properties to fall apart in neighborhood after neighborhood throughout Durham, while no one is able to devise a program to bring them into compliance.

We hear a lot about "broken windows" theories of community development when we talk to our municipal leaders. Think of vehicles driving at unsafe speeds through our neighborhood streets as mobile broken windows. The prompt parents to keep their kids indoors, and discourage pedestrians from using the neighborhood. There are about as many traffic fatalities in Durham as homicides over the past five or six years. It's not an insignificant problem, and it's one that deserves more of an effort from our civic leaders to fix than what we're getting.