SPRINGFIELD -- The sight of a police officer pointing a radar gun at you makes many drivers’ hearts race.  The feeling gets considerably worse when the lights come on and the patrol car pulls out.

  “The last thing you want is to see red and blue lights in the rearview mirror,” said Police Chief Lynn Rowe.

  KY3 News recently analyzed data from more than 11,000 speeding tickets to find out when and where you’re most likely to get caught in the city, and how fast drivers are going when they’re ticketed.

  We marked a map of the city to show where you're most likely to get a speeding ticket.

  “If you look at this map, it's exactly where we need to be,” said Lt. David Millsap.

  The top spot is West Chestnut Expressway between the intersection of College Street/Scenic Avenue and Kansas Expressway.  Police say it's all about preventing wrecks.

  “The whole Kansas Expressway corridor; we’ve got to get it slowed down,” said Millsap.  “We're in the area to slow traffic down and get people to pay attention to what's going on.”

   Walnut Lawn between Campbell and Kansas avenues is another top spot.  This is a recently improved four-lane divided road but the speed limit is only 35 miles per hour.

  “People will drive at their comfort level.  When they get a road like that they feel comfortable enough to go faster,” said Millsap.  “I can tell you we have numerous citizen complaints about how fast traffic goes there.  We spend a lot of time in that area targeting that.”

  Another area that police target is Campbell south of the James River Freeway (U.S. 60).

  “We want to slow traffic down coming into and leaving town so we can target areas we're having accidents.  On Campbell, that's what we're targeting,” said Millsap.

  Next is Campbell between Sunshine and Grand near Parkview High School.  Heading north, the speed limit drops to 30 miles an hour here.

  “You’ve got a lot of traffic there because of school, young drivers and not a lot of traffic control, not a lot of stop lights to slow traffic down,” the lieutenant said.

   Another place with a lot of tickets is around National Avenue at Bennett Street near Missouri State University.

  “If you look at traffic in the morning, students are out, joggers are out in that area, there’s foot and bicycle traffic, student traffic crossing streets, so we try to keep traffic slowed down in that area,” said Millsap.

  Police write the most speeding tickets over the lunch hour -- about 12:30.  Police say it's an issue of manpower and overlapping shifts.

  “We have more people out doing traffic as the day goes on,” said Millsap.

  Plus, plenty of drivers are in a hurry on their lunch break.

  Another statistic is the average speed over the limit for which tickets are written is not eight, not 10, and not even 12; it’s 16.

  “If an officer is doing the job properly, they're not going to write a ticket at one or two (mph) over but frequently we get violations of 100 in a 60 mph zone,” said Rowe.

  The chief says that drives up the average.

  “It also tells me officers are being fairly lenient and, if the objective is to educate and not cause hardships, sometimes a warning is as good as a ticket,” he said.

  Many people have heard that police write more tickets at the end of the month.  Our investigation found that’s true.  You're almost twice as likely to get a speeding ticket in the final week of the month in Springfield than any other week of the month.

  Rowe says that doesn’t mean there's a quota.

  “Absolutely not. That is something we don't track.  We look by day of the week but not by the week of the month so it's purely coincidental,” the chief said.

  “I can tell you unequivocally there is no quota regarding tickets,” said Millsap. “I can't even come up with a good reason why the numbers show that.  I have no idea.”

Police helped with this report because they'd rather see people slow down than write tickets. If drivers are aware when and where officers are looking for them, and obey traffic laws as a result, streets are safer and officers are happier.
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KY3 News received technical assistance on this study from Investigative Reporters and Editors, an organization whose headquarters is at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.