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- San Francisco traffic citations are way down. And yet.
San Francisco traffic citations are way down. And yet.
A true tale of idiocy and losing in court, sort of.
It’s been a big story that police in Garbage City have basically stopped issuing traffic tickets.
A new analysis of every traffic citation issued by San Francisco police over the past 4½ years shows enforcement of the rules of the road has plummeted. Incredibly, the 45 officers working in the department’s traffic division have issued a combined 10 citations a day this year.
Yes, in a city with nearly half a million registered vehicles, a ticket is written every 2½ hours, on average. That’s a huge drop in just three years: In 2019, the department issued an average of 74 traffic citations per day — or about one every 20 minutes.
No wonder everyone out here is driving like a maniac! Except me, I’m perfect. Anyway, my driving route began to include Lombard Street last year or so, thank god not the touristy, car-thefty part, but the brutal workmanlike part that leads from Van Ness to the Golden Gate Bridge. In the many years since I’ve regularly driven that way, the City has made some changes. Now, the right lane is HOV and bus and right turn only. They put up some very tiny signs to let people know!
Do you see it? If it was a snake it woulda bit you, right? Let’s get a better look.
So I tried to figure out what was happening here and somewhere in my mind I decided it said “HOV 2+ & TURNS AHEAD // 5 PM - 8 PM” because that’s like commute hours towards the bridge, right? Makes sense, right? So I was usually on this stretch of Lombard around 3:30, 4:00, and happily using the right lane without a care in the world.
Until a few weeks ago. CUE OMINOUS MUSIC.
So I had my dog in the car and it was like 3:30 and I’m in the right lane and I see a motorcycle cop up ahead and the guy in front of me in the right lane suddenly gets over into the middle lane and I think “oh, that’s weird, why did he do that,” and I pass the cop on the right, still under the speed limit, and don’t really think anything of it until I see him with the lights on behind me and I realize it’s for me. So I pulled over.
So he comes up on the passenger side and I roll the window down and my dog starts growling. ACAB, amirite! And the cop goes “Any reason why you were in the bus or carpool lane?” And he looks at my dog and I am pretty sure he thought I was going to try and count my dog as my 2+ but I didn’t. I explained about how I thought it said 5 PM and I was in good faith compliance with the law? He didn’t like that so he wrote me a ticket and told me going to court was a waste of my time (no kidding, he really said that).
So you can do this thing called trial by declaration where you write up your side of the story and send it in and truth be told I didn’t really want to go to court anyway so I did that and explained again the whole 5 AM/PM confusion and guess what. The judge did not like it either. $233 plus traffic school.
What have we learned from this little episode? That the good are punished while the wicked go free. That even a San Francisco cop can’t resist a traffic offense committed by someone dumb enough to do it directly in front of them. And that your dog does not count for HOV lane purposes, even though the sign doesn’t specify “human.”
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