64°F
weather icon Mostly Cloudy

Nevada ticketed thousands of drivers for going 100 mph or more last year

Updated February 1, 2022 - 7:48 pm

Nevada police wrote more than 5,100 speeding tickets for drivers traveling 100 mph or more last year, marking at least the second year in the row citations have jumped.

But one law enforcement official says the numbers would be much higher if staffing within the Nevada Highway Patrol wasn’t at “critically low levels.

“I would say there are definitely hundreds, if not thousands, of more citations of this type (that) would be given out if we are fully staffed,” said trooper Matthew Kaplan, president of the Nevada Police Union. “The ability to be out there enforcing is severely handicapped right now.”

According to new data from the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety, nearly two-thirds of the tickets in 2021 were written in Clark County, the most-populated county in the state. The second-most, about 450, were written in Elko County. The rural northern county, which borders Idaho and Utah, is the state’s sixth most-populated.

In 2019, 3,517 tickets were written statewide. In 2020, the annual number grew to 4,415 and then to 5,137 in 2021, an average of about 14 drivers cited every day. Citation data for years prior was not immediately available.

Erin Breen, director of UNLV’s Road Equity Alliance Project, called last year’s statistics “mind-boggling.”

“Even the 2019 numbers are shocking,” she said. “It comes down to selfish drivers.”

No road in Nevada allows drivers to travel 100 mph. The highest posted speed in the state is 80 mph along segments of Interstate 80, which runs east to west across the northern half of the state.

In Clark County, speed limits reach a maximum of 75 mph in rural areas and 65 mph within the Las Vegas Valley, according the Nevada Department of Transportation.

Yet, nearly two-thirds of the speeding tickets in 2021, 3,360, were written in the county.

Police believe that a North Las Vegas man was driving a Dodge Challenger over 100 mph when he ran a red light and caused a six-vehicle crash that killed nine people, including himself, on Saturday. Gary Dean Robinson, 59, was traveling on Commerce Street, where the posted speed limit is 35 mph.

Both local authorities and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.

“This tragedy is an extreme example to be sure, but speeding at any magnitude unquestionably increases the risks to safety,” NTSB member Tom Chapman said at North Las Vegas City Hall on Monday.

A car traveling 100 mph covers about 147 feet each second, enough speed to travel the length of an NFL football field in under three seconds. Wrecks can have catastrophic results.

“Those are the ones that are the worst that we see as troopers,” Kaplan said.

As of January, state officials reported that 85 of 471 sworn law-enforcement positions in the Highway Patrol were vacant.

But Kaplan said the vacancy rate is closer to 50 percent in the field. After a trooper is hired, it can take a year before they have sufficient training to patrol on their own.

Now, its common for six troopers per shift to be responsible for covering the 175 miles of Las Vegas Valley roads that fall under the highway patrol’s jurisdiction, Kaplan said.

“There was a time that the public would never drive past the state trooper on the highway, and now there’s just no fear of consequences,” he said. “We have drivers passing us all the time, and committing violations in front of us in a way that they weren’t afraid to before.”

A previous version of the story had an incorrect number for Highway Patrol vacancies.

Contact Michael Scott Davidson at sdavidson@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861. Follow @davidsonlvrj on Twitter.

THE LATEST
Nevadans support diaper tax exemption, state lottery

A public opinion poll on how Nevadans are feeling about several ballot questions found majority support a tax exemption for diapers, open primaries and ranked choice voting, and enshrining abortion rights into the constitution.

Aging Hoover Dam may get $45M for maintenance

It will take tens of millions of dollars to repair and improve the dam over the next 10 years, officials estimate.

 
Nevada terminates grants to immunization nonprofit

A nonprofit will have grants terminated after state officials say it failed to pay over $400,000 to vendors despite the state reimbursing it for those payments.

A look back at Henderson’s chemical plant history

The Black Mountain Industrial Complex near Henderson has served as a hub for industrial plants has had its fair share of environmental issues through the years.

74-year-old man dies in crash on US 95

A 74-year-old Utah man died earlier this month after colliding with a van on U.S. Highway 95.