Jim Hughes accepted the bad news calmly, but nonetheless was smarting from the unexpected bruising he had just received in traffic court.
“I find it really unfair,” said the 32-year-old Pittsburg man after learning that he had lost his driver’s license for 10 days.
After all, Hughes said, he only was doing 89 mph on Highway 4, to escape a driver who was coming up fast behind him.
With a mortgage, car payments and a family to support, he can’t afford to stay at home, so his girlfriend probably will be the one chauffeuring him to his carpenter’s job in San Ramon at 6 a.m.
Hughes is only one in a string of drivers to have the California Vehicle Code book thrown at them in Contra Costa County Superior Court in Pittsburg, where Commissioner Lowell Richards last month began leaning even harder on those caught speeding.
Fines alone weren’t working, he said, even though they can run as high as $711 for a first offense.
Fed up with the steady stream of speeding cases through his courtroom, Richards in 2006 had started suspending licenses for 30 days if drivers were ticketed for going 25 mph or more over the speed limit.
Up until then, he said, he and the other commissioners only suspended driver’s licenses occasionally and even then only when someone had committed several traffic violations.
But last year Richards clamped down, temporarily grounding more than 1,000 people.
Even that didn’t motivate as many drivers to mend their ways as he had hoped, however.
“I had hoped the word would get out, but it doesn’t seem to have changed much,” he said.
Reny Sunga of the California Highway Patrol has the same impression.
“The speeds are still there,” said the motorcycle officer, who said she thinks just as many people are going as fast as they ever did.
And so Richards reluctantly decided to tighten the screws.
“I’d rather not have to do this, but people out here are going to have to help me,” the 69-year-old judge said.
He’s not interested in punishing per se, Richards says. He just wants drivers to understand the seriousness of their actions.
His demeanor on the bench suggests that he’s sincere: Richards exudes a warmth that belies the poker-faced and aloof persona often ascribed to judges.
He doesn’t believe in tongue-lashings even when he encounters drivers like the woman who was ticketed doing 85 mph on Kirker Pass in the rain – with her children in the car – knowing that her brakes were bad.
Or the man who, after zigzagging across four lanes of traffic and the shoulder of the road at 101 mph, insisted he was just traveling with the flow of traffic.
But underlying Richards’ friendly tone is an unmistakable firmness that lets defendants know he means business.
In January, Richards lowered the threshold he had chosen for triggering a suspension, making it that much easier for someone with a lead foot to lose their license.
Over the course of one week last month he ordered 14 10-day suspensions in addition to the 33 driver’s licenses he yanked for 30 days.
“They have to have some jolt to the system to make them think the next time their foot hits the accelerator,” he said.
Richards is the first of the county’s four commissioners to order 10-day suspensions for those found guilty of driving 20 to 24 mph over the limit.
“What kills out here is the difference in speed between those who are obeying the law and those who aren’t,” Richards said, noting that the faster one drives, the longer it takes to stop and the harder it is for tires to grip the road.
One day in January, 43 percent of the cases Richards heard were related to speeding; earlier that week they accounted for a third of the day’s docket.
Most people aren’t deliberately ignoring the speed limit, Richards said – they are simply oblivious.
Antioch police officer Joe Zanarini agrees.
“People get so focused on what they’re doing they don’t pay attention to their speedometer,” he said, noting that several speeding vehicles nearly hit him while he was processing an accident scene last month even though his patrol car’s emergency lights were flashing.
New cars these days offer such a smooth, quiet ride that drivers don’t realize how fast they’re traveling, Zanarini added.
Others react to the increasingly crowded roads by using the accelerator to make up lost time wherever they can.
“You’ve got so many people and everybody is in a hurry,” said Zanarini, who easily can write 20 or more speeding tickets on the days he’s working a traffic enforcement detail.
Contact Rowena Coetsee at rcoetsee@cctimes.com or (925)779-7141.
