ARLINGTON, Va.—Today, Stow Municipal Court issued a court order declaring it will suspend its appeal fee that required motorists to pay $100, which effectively put […]
Ohio has long been a hotbed of this sort of activity. Just a few dozen miles north of the Stow-CV National-Park area, there was, for the longest time, Linndale, on Interstate 71.
Now, Ohio has a curious law: State Highway Patrol is NOT permitted to enforce speed laws in municipal-corporation limits. In the linked case, that would be Peninsula, a municipal corporation, where the "responsibility" for enforcing traffic laws, would be the "city's." Not the State Patrol's, and not the Sheriff's.
In Linndale, 500 yards of I-71 went through what had been Linndale's municipal boundaries. Now, Linndale was a "pocket suburb" of Cleveland. It EXISTED, as a railroad bedroom community - it was where the black Pullman porters of various railroad scheduled passenger runs, would live. Cleveland didn't want them living in the German-majority Ohio-City area; they were wealthy enough to resent living in Hough, which was further away, anyway. Linndale was created, and there they lived.
The railroad structure changed, and the Pullman company went away. The Interstate came and crossed over a small quarter of their tiny municipal limits. There were no exit ramps directly into Linndale, but for decades, that didn't matter. They had a police force, and most of what it did was hand out tickets on I-71, some deserved, many not.
Challenges were thrown out on technicalities. If you wanted to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fight a $100 ticket, you could. In 30 years time, nobody did...until an attorney got busted, and was rich enough and angry enough and connected enough, to shut the operation down. Part of it had to do with a charge of fiscal mismanagement by the city of Linndale, leading to the mayor and key players being removed.
It was about that time that I left the area, and when I returned a decade later, Linndale was just waving to speeders as they roared through to the Brooklyn speed trap a half-mile away. Another tiny inner-ring suburb.
The problem is state law, which limits the State Patrol - which may or may not be a good thing - but also county sheriffs, which in other states, could be used to curb abuses. Or at least compete for the revenue, by also writing tickets, making speed-trapping unprofitable.