YORK COUNTY, Va. (WAVY) — Another local community is pushing to keep you honest when it comes to driving in school zones.
We’ve seen speed cameras put up recently in Portsmouth and Suffolk.
Now, York-Poquoson Sheriff Ron Montgomery said he thinks cameras need to be installed in York County, also.
And drivers there have no one to blame but themselves.
“My agency has received a larger than usual amount of complaints about speeding in school zones,” Montgomery said.
A study was done at five York County schools to see how bad the problem was. If drivers went more than 10 mph over the speed limit when the school zone lights were flashing, a violation was registered.
Montgomery said that over the course of five consecutive days, the York-Poquoson Sheriff’s Office noted 3,725 violations at the five schools — morning and afternoon combined.
Last Thursday, Montgomery went before the York County Board of Supervisors to get approval for speed cameras similar to ones used now in Portsmouth and Suffolk.
Like those, there will be a learning period for the public’s education — warning signs as well as information on social media.
Each violation will set drivers back $100. It will be a civil violation, with no points taken off of a violator’s driving record. The hopes are that it will make drivers slow down in school zones.
“We’re going to make sure that … the signs are there,” Montgomery said. “There’s a lot of advertisements about it, and we’ll try to make the public as aware of this as we possibly be, because the overall goal is to significantly reduce that [3,725 violations] down to as close to zero as we can get.