Today's important headline leads me to ask the following question. Is South Florida's speeding the issue or is it simply increased opportunity?
Here's an excerpt from the Sun Sentinel, Tickets down by a half-million in South Florida; crashes up by nearly 34,000.
Excerpt: State records show 33,821 more crashes in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties in 2017 than in 2012. At the same time, cops in the three counties issued a half-million fewer tickets for speeding and other non-criminal moving violations.
Now, it's likely that there's some type of connection between fewer speeding citations and more accidents occurring but I think that might be an overly simplistic answer. How much of it is simply due to more people being on the roads? I pulled the population and tourism numbers from 2012 & 2017. Here's the difference.
Tri-County population in 2012 was at 5.8 million and in 2017 it went up to 6.25 million. That's 450,000 additional people alone. Presumably most of which drive at least some of the time. Then, there's the tourism boom. Over that five-year window, tourism exploded in South Florida as we emerged from the recession.
South Florida has 15.7 million visitors in 2012 and bumped up to 31.1 million visitors in 2017. That's a 15.4 million visitor increase in five years. Presumably, some of them are on the road some of the time. So, is it really about fewer speeding citations or simply considerably more opportunity for something to go wrong? The answer might be a combination but it's almost certainly not simply about fewer speeding tickets being issued.
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