If you’re driving 40 mph and you take your eyes off the road for three seconds to read a text message, you’ve essentially driven blind for about 180 feet, sheriff’s Deputy Todd Young said. Then, you travel another 90 feet for the 1½ seconds it takes the average person to react, he said.
“Now you’ve got to try to stop and that’s usually not going to happen,” he said.
Catching drivers using their cellphones is one of the three main things Young is looking for when he’s performing school zone enforcement. The other violations he’s scanning for are people driving without wearing their seat belts and people driving more than 20 mph — the speed limit in school zones.
He and one other traffic deputy balance school zone enforcement with other duties, which includes investigating serious injury or fatal collisions.
When he does enforcement, Young said that his goal is to have pleasant interactions with drivers.
Idling in a turnout on Northeast Rosewood Avenue near Covington Middle School on Monday morning, Young spotted a silvery Chevrolet Malibu traveling 34 mph in a 20 mph school zone.
In one motion, he whipped behind the driver and put on his lights.
“She just dropped her child off and she’s headed to work and she’s a little late,” Young said as he returned to his car to issue her a ticket. “She understood what she did. She said ‘thank you’ …Ninety five percent of folks I issue a ticket to say thank you.”
Young said that traffic enforcement around schools is important, but if you ask him how much he does it, he answers: “not enough.”
“Is it something that we’re doing everyday? No,” he said. But, he said he knows that having a presence will get drivers to slow down and follow traffic safety laws. “It’s something we try to get to and spend time at.”
The sentiment is one that’s echoed by the Vancouver Police Department. Traffic Sgt. Therese Kubala said that the traffic unit normally does a school zone enforcement push at the beginning of the year and then intermittently visits schools during peak hours to address problems and concerns when they arise. Some of the bigger trouble spots, she said, are the schools located on main thoroughfares such as Orchards Elementary and Evergreen High School.
But with only four members in the traffic unit, down from 16 officers and supervisors prior to the Great Recession, the unit is limited in its ability to be proactive by doing enforcement and education, Vancouver Police Chief James McElvain said.
The agency currently receives grants and uses Neighbors On Watch volunteers to help bolster school zone enforcement, but McElvain hopes to increase the number of officers in the traffic unit for a long-term solution. In a presentation to city councilors last month, McElvain advocated for hiring 42 more officers over the next five years, adding traffic officers each year.
“School zones are particular locations for emphasis because we typically find a high volume of motorist and pedestrian traffic in the morning and afternoon times of the day as kids are going to and leaving school,” he said. “While signage in school zones is important, the presence of law enforcement conducting enforcement is a good reminder for the motoring public to be mindful of children crossing the roadway in greater numbers around the schools.”
Since Jan. 1, traffic officers have patrolled 10 different school zones within the city and written roughly 20 citations, Kubala said. That statistic does not represent total number of stops or warnings, nor does it include any citations written by patrol officers.
She said the amount of time spent on school zone enforcement is “not nearly what we’d like it to be … I wish we could do it daily.”
Kubala said that as a parent, she can speak from personal experience about the stresses of dropping off or picking up a child from school.
“It becomes a rat race getting in and out of there. People get crazy when they get in their cars,” she said. “It’s just better to be safe than a few minutes late.”
