The Willow Glen Resident

Council Watch

City allows NASCOP to continue guarding city streets

Effectiveness of program devised to deter speeders still under review

By Cecily Barnes

At its Sept. 30 meeting, the San Jose City Council voted to extend a pilot project set up last year to deter speeders. The program, called NASCOP--the Neighborhood Automated Speed Compliance Program--automatically clocks and photographs speeders, who are then issued tickets through the mail. The project will be extended until December 1997 and will be reviewed by the Department of Streets and Traffic in February.

"At that time we will provide the City Council with our recommendations about whether the program should be full time," said Larry Moore, senior civil engineer for the Department of Streets and Traffic.

For the past year and a half, the city of San Jose has parked a Ford Arrowstar van strapped with hidden video cameras on neighborhood streets throughout San Jose, including several streets in Willow Glen. The high-tech van utilizes video equipment to nab speeders. A radar antenna, pointed out the back window, sends signals to the video monitors to take photographs of the front and back of speeding vehicles to capture license plate numbers. A citation is then sent to the home of the vehicle's registered owner. According to Moore, the program has successfully curbed speeding on monitored streets including Blewett, Glen Eyrie, Bird and Minnesota avenues.

"We've seen significant reductions of speeding on the streets we've been enforcing," Moore said. "The evidence is not so much how many photographs we are taking, but how many fewer photographs we are taking."

According to Moore, the San Jose Police Department has little time to monitor speeding on neighborhood streets because of the higher number of violations on major thoroughfares. And typically, vehicles only speed down neighborhood streets during rush hour, when police are most needed to patrol major roads, Moore said. Hence NASCOP has filled a niche previously overlooked by SJPD's ticketing system.

"It was deemed that the NASCOP program would only be used on local neighborhood streets," Moore said. "It kind of fills in a gap; we say it works as an adjunct to regular police enforcement."

Neighbors seem to be happy with the results of NASCOP. According to Joe Guerra, chief aide to District 6 City Councilmember Frank Fiscalini, his office has only heard positive feedback

"The only calls we got on NASCOP were people complaining that it wasn't there long enough," Guerra said.

NASCOP has cost the city of San Jose $112,280 since February 1996. The results of the pilot program, including how much money NASCOP made the city, have not yet been determined.

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