MEMPHIS, Tenn. — WREG looked at nearly four months of speeding tickets from January through most of April to find areas where drivers get pulled over a lot.
As you might have guessed, the interstates repeatedly came up. For example, I-240 at spots like Jackson, Lamar, and Poplar. There were at least 1,102 tickets given in those three areas combined.
“I mean we all do it,” Anthony Johnson said.
He’s gotten his fair share of speeding tickets. He’s not surprised I-240 and Poplar is a problem area. He says he’s seen lots of accidents caused by inattentive speeders coming off the eastbound exit.
“Somebody coming off the off ramp and they going a bit too slow and somebody’s coming around and before you know it you’re right up on them,” he said.
Fred Shackeaford says he sees police pulled over on the shoulder of I-240 all the time with radar guns out.
“You know they spots. When you driving the same road every day you know where they gonna hang out at,” he said. “It’s normal for them. They want to catch you.”
And while speeding on I-240 isn’t a shock, this next area might surprise you. We’re talking about Steele Street, from Whitney to Pershing Park. It’s a roughly mile stretch of road that cuts through a quiet Frayser neighborhood. Nearly 40 speeding tickets were given on that stretch of road in only a few months.
The numbers don’t surprise Letha Brown. She’s lived in the neighborhood for years.
“It be a little dangerous sometimes,” she said.
She goes for walks all the time and says dodging inattentive speeders is, unfortunately, a necessity.
“That’s why I get on and get on across the street. Sometimes I have to run but I’ma get up out the way,” she said.
Of the nearly 19,000 speeding tickets we went through at least 168 were given in school zones. Nine of them were given by Kate Bond Elementary in Cordova.
Kyra Williams lives in the neighborhood.
“It scares me,” she says.
She fears it’s only a matter of time before a child gets hit. She wishes frequent speeders would be more responsible around kids.
“They just need to slow down and be careful and just think of the children,” she said.
We found a number of other speeding hotspots in Memphis but it’s hard to say which location racked up the most tickets because the city’s data is incomplete. A number of ticket locations aren’t specific because they only list a street or interstate with no cross street or exit. Dozens of entries don’t list a location at all.
One more interesting thing to note. We found that 21 percent of all the tickets we looked at were dismissed or not prosecuted.
