Speeders getting busted in crackdown on Quito Road
By Leigh Ann Maze
Saratoga residents complained to Saratoga's interim City Manager, Bill Norton, so much about the speeding drivers on Quito Road that Jeff Miles, captain of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department Westside Substation, stepped up enforcement in the area on July 3. In less than two weeks, sheriff's deputies wrote over 45 citations to speeders on Quito Road.
"That is a considerable amount of tickets," Miles said. "Which indicates that there is a problem there."
Quito Road is a wooded, residential road that winds its way from Los Gatos-Saratoga Road in Los Gatos to Saratoga Avenue on the line between Saratoga and San Jose.
According to sheriff's deputy Greg Taylor, who wrote some of the tickets, some drivers were going as fast as 48 mph in a zone that is marked 25 mph. About half of the roughly four-mile length of Quito Road is posted at 25 mph, while other parts are posted at up to 35 mph.
One driver was clocked on the radar gun at 56 mph and was cited for reckless driving, which is a misdemeanor and goes on a person's criminal record. A regular speeding ticket is an infraction.
"Anytime someone doubles the speed limit inside city limits, I consider that reckless driving," Taylor said. "I felt he was endangering other people's lives."
Taylor even found himself ticketing a Quito Road resident who had complained about the speeders to the city of Saratoga. "He was good-natured about it," Taylor said.
Most of the ticketed speeders were going between 40 mph and 45 mph and received fines ranging from about $75 to $125.
According to Taylor, the legal speeds are low because of the curvy, residential nature of the road. There is often very little, if any, room on the road's shoulders and there is a lot of pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
Taylor said people might be breaking the law because the road was repaved about one month ago.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
