LSP to crack down on speeding ahead of the holidays

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Louisiana State Police says since Dec. 5, the agency has worked six fatal crashes.

One happened on Airline Highway near Barringer Foreman Road. Investigators say a father and son were riding in a Ferrari when their car left the road and flipped. LSP says speed was a factor in this case.

From July of 2018 to July of 2019, LSP says troopers gave out almost 183,000 speeding tickets across the state.

“Troopers are out there doing their job ensuring the road is safe,” said LSP Public Information Officer Taylor Scrantz. “But still, every single day, as I’m speaking to you right now, cars are passing us speeding.”

LSP says people speed throughout the day along Airline Highway, but they’re more likely to drive faster when the traffic slows down and later at night.

But did you know troopers can catch drivers as they’re headed to their next stop even if they’re hundreds of feet away from the radar gun?

Scrantz says some radar guns can catch vehicles up to 600 feet away. Other drivers try to slow it down when they notice a trooper is ahead, but by then, you can almost guarantee yourself a ticket.

“Ordinarily, by the time people see the trooper on the side of the road, they’ve already got their speed in there,” he said.

Troopers are always patrolling, but with the holidays right around the corner, expect to see officers cracking down and handing out tickets to people going over the limit, which can lessen the possibility of a crash.

“We’re not out there to write speeding tickets to ruin people’s days by any means. We’re out here to protect the public,” Scrantz said.

This is the kind of information troopers want you to know because they want to deter folks from flying down the road.

“We catch people going a variety of speeds. Seventy miles per hour up to 100 miles per hour,” Scrantz said.

The goal is to save a life, so take the speed limit as law, not as a suggestion and avoid being pulled over.

The speed limit on a portion of Airline Highway is 55 mph. LSP says troopers have caught people going up to 100 mph.

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