The city is right to look at all options to enhance traffic safety on city streets, but should proceed carefully before using police to increase traffic enforcement and generate more tickets.

The city is re-evaluating its traffic-calming program, which primarily consists of implementing physical devices such as speed humps or traffic circles to slow traffic. The city allocates $200,000 annually for traffic calming, but there isn’t enough funding to address all of the projects. The city reports there are 20 projects that remain unfunded.

City Manager Tom Markus floated the increased traffic enforcement idea, saying there isn’t enough money to address all of the traffic calming projects.

“I think we’ve gone down a path of thinking that traffic is going to be dealt with with physical improvements, and sometimes it will be, but the reality is, there isn’t much funding available for that,” Markus said.

Statistics show that in the past decade, the number of traffic violations in Lawrence has decreased by 30,000 per year, or by 70 percent. The drop from 2010 to 2011 went from 41,000 traffic citations to 13,000 traffic citations. Traffic citations have remained largely stable since 2011.

It’s not clear what drove the declines in traffic tickets. Lawrence police spokesman Derrick Smith noted that in 2012, the department eliminated its full-time traffic unit and reassigned those officers to patrol. “Traffic enforcement is now handled primarily by officers assigned to patrol, which means it is mixed in with all the other responsibilities assigned to a patrol officer, which can be numerous,” Smith said.

Markus didn’t say whether he felt more officers needed to be hired or if job duties simply needed to be adjusted. “I would just say that, within the police department, it’s a matter of priorities,” he said, “and that we may need more traffic law enforcement to go along with other ways that we try to calm traffic in the community.”

But before the city does anything, it should review data on the correlation between heavy traffic enforcement and safety. What impact did the significant reduction in traffic tickets after 2011 have on the number of accidents on Lawrence streets? That data should be a good indicator of the effectiveness of increased patrols on speeding.

There are other options that can and should be explored, including automated systems that could prove to be more efficient in the long run than committing more officers to traffic enforcement. There are no automated speed enforcement systems in Kansas, but state law does not prohibit them.

Also, given the significant spike Lawrence has experienced in violent crime in recent years, is shifting more police focus on traffic enforcement really the right priority?

Ultimately, the goal of traffic calming is safety. If more traffic enforcement is necessary to make city streets safer, then the city should absolutely proceed. But if city traffic accident data show otherwise, increased traffic enforcement might not be the best use of police resources.