State Route 52 at Santo Road is a place where traffic is usually pretty bad during rush hours.
But midday on Tuesday, things were moving right along — a time when you’re likely to see more drivers exceeding the speed limit.
“If you are going over that 65 mile an hour speed limit, you can be stopped. It’s a maximum speed limit. And then for our rural areas, there is a maximum speed limit of 70 miles per hour, but it will be posted,” said 20-year veteran CHP Officer Jared Grieshaber.
Grieshaber usually works out of the agency’s border division office, but during this Maximum Enforcement Period (MEP), he said it’s all hands on deck. “So even if you have, let’s say, an office job where your primary duties aren’t working patrol, we’re gonna have every officer out there enforcing and focusing on the speeders.”
The MEP began 6 a.m. Tuesday and continues through 5:59 a.m. Wednesday.
Photographer Michael Spaulding and I rode along with Officer Grieshaber on Tuesday, and it wasn’t long before he was notified by another officer of a speeder in the vicinity of the Interstate 15 and Highway 163 interchange.
He ended up citing the driver for an illegally altered license plate instead of speeding.
But speeding is a big problem in the Golden State. Grieshaber reeled off some troubling statistics.
“We had over 400 deaths, which is, if you think about it, that’s at least one a day, all attributed to speeding. It doesn’t take into account factors, you know, like DUI and all that other stuff, but that’s just because of speeding. We had over 400 deaths and nearly 70,000 injuries because of speeding,” he said.
Those are statistics the CHP hopes are sobering enough to get folks to slow down to prevent injuries and save lives.
