Doing it right - police work in Roseville, CA

From MSN:

Town slams brakes on traffic tickets
Speeders venturing off I-80 in Northern California shouldn't get the wrong idea. The little city of Roseville, north of Sacramento, hasn't nixed traffic tickets altogether.

But it has cut the number of moving citations issued by a striking 84%, and no one's complaining.

Drivers received 1,317 traffic tickets in the first six months of 2011, compared with 8,236 during the same time last year, after City Manager Ray Kerridge, a former engineer, said he wanted police to focus on long-term solutions and not feel pressured to write tickets. Nor did he want drivers to feel ambushed by speed traps.

Officers are now assigned dangerous areas and asked to be creative, consulting with community leaders and traffic engineers if need be.

"If collisions are high at one intersection, tell me how to solve that," Roseville Police Chief Daniel Hahn says. "It might be red lights or erecting a median," or simply beefing up presence at certain hours.

"Well, the whole time you're doing that -- that you're not writing tickets -- you're solving the problem. You're permanently solving the problem," Hahn says.

The results so far? The number of traffic accidents in Roseville, population 115,000, was down 7% in the first six months of this year.

Fewer tickets. Fewer accidents. Cheaper insurance.

The article goes on to give the history of policing traffic and it has some interesting and old roots:

In 1903, when New York City adopted William P. Eno's "Rules of the Road," the foundation of modern traffic protocol, the city immediately created a concurrent battalion of police to enforce those rules. This was decades before the states began issuing driver's licenses, in the 1930s.

Still, it was wise thinking. Modern academic research supports the notion that drivers are far more likely to obey traffic laws when they fear getting caught. (Knowing how much your car insurance rates could rise is also a deterrent.)

The question is whether traffic tickets are the only solution. Or, as the budding example of Roseville indicates, might issuing more tickets even be the poorer option?

More at the site -- worth reading and adopting. The entrenched mentality of we have always done it this way is holding us back -- so pervasive that we are not aware of it until we start to peek behind the curtains...