[Rick Lee]

I wrote a letter once to the Fairfax Co. cops, asking them to set up a patrol or checkpoint at the Vienna Metro station because cars were simply not stopping for pedestrians in the crosswalk going to a neighboring parking garage. Several times I came close to getting hit when there was no excuse at all for the cars to not see people in the crosswalk, both during daylight and night time hours. A few weeks later, sure enough, the cops were there on foot pulling people over and handing out tickets. Yeah, they probably got plenty of revenue from that, but they fixed the problem pretty quickly and were doing it for a safety issue.

In another spot in Springfield, VA, cops hid behind a large sign to nail cars going straight from the left-turn-only lane. Problem here was that the signage for the restricted lane was pretty bad, there was not much room to change lanes before the intersection and if you missed it, you had a lot of work to do to make a U-turn farther down the road. And the cops also caused a lot of traffic with their stops. THis was a case of revenue raising. They could have easily done some painting and added a sign or two to fix the problem. But it was worth too much $$ to keep it the way it was.