Athens, Georgia Speed Traps

Travelling through the intersection with Baxter St. headed southbound on Alps Rd., one will enter a school zone that drops the speed limit from the normal 35MPH to 25MPH. Watch for the flashing lights overhead. The school zone is enforced until 8:30AM–well after classes begin. I have never seen any child pedestrians in the area.

Athens police will sit in the parking lot of Ben Burton park and hit people as they go by. They are usually sitting there on the weekends late at night.

West Broad Street becomes Atlanta highway as it passes the Howard Johnson’s hotel and crosses the Middle Oconee River bridge. By this point, the road is six lanes wide with a 12-foot-wide median — and a speed limit of 40. The cops like to sit in the parking lot of the KMart as you approach the new Epps Bridge Parkway interchange, and point their radar down at cars traveling westbound across the bridge. Before you cross the bridge, you head down a long hill which helps you build up speed, making it easy for Athens-Clarke County cops to make a killing off speeding tickets in this area.

If you’re driving on College Station Road headed toward the University of Georgia campus, the cop sits on the right side of the road right above where Research Road intersects it, and points his radar up the hill toward the curve where the road passes through a small residential area. College Station Road is a four-lane road, yet only has a speed limit of 35 in the target area, and since people begin to head downhill slightly after rounding the curve, they begin to speed up just in time for the cop to zap them with radar. Adding further insult to injury is the fact that the speed limit gets raised to 45 the moment you pass Research Road, just a couple hundred feet down from where the cop sits.

On this road, of course the speed limit of 25 is unrealistic. A speed of 40 would be more like it. Anyways, because of this the UNIVESITY police get many people on this road.