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Florida’s Department of Transportation Secretary Ananth Prasad was ticketed on a Tallahassee for doing 44 in a 35.  A short time later, DOT commenced a study of road conditions and decided to raise the speed limit to 45. As Mike Vasilinda tells us, Prasad says he wasn’t the only one who complained.

For more than two decades, the speed limit on Thomasville Road in Tallahassee, which connects the state capitol with the city’s affluent neighborhoods and Interstate Ten was posted at 35 miles per hour.

Radar operations were frequent. We asked Will Messer, one of the local motorists, about police radar activity on this stretch of the road.

Reporter: “How often did you see a radar?”

Will Messer: “Quite a bit”.

Reporter: “They always had someone pulled over”.

Will Messer: “They patrol this area pretty well”.

Police used  driveways, side-streets, and a strip mall to catch speeding motorists. And then one night police stopped the wrong guy. State DOT Secretary Ananth Prasad. He was cited for doing 44 in a 35.  “I was at fault, so she wrote the ticket and I did the driver’s ed. All is good”, says Prasad. He added,  “started getting a lot of phone calls about people getting ticketed going through that stretch”.

He ordered a study.

The mathematically weighted study came back saying the road could handle a limit of 47 miles per hour. “Our study did show that it was artificially constrained”, says Prasad.

The city complained, saying the higher limit went against their efforts to create a walkable environment. Prasad prevailed the road is now posted at 45.

Business owners say the police have disappeared. “We haven’t seen them recently. Not since last six months”, says BJ Joshi, business owner.

Reporter: “That’s when they changed the limit”.

BJ Joshi: “When they changed the limit. Correct”.

Details on how many tickets have been issued along this mile stretch are not readily available.