Let me paint you a picture.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon. You’re on I-74 heading toward Indy. You’ve got somewhere to be. The speed limit drops to 55 because there’s a construction zone coming up — you know this because there are seventeen signs telling you so, each one slightly more emphatic than the last, the final one apparently written by someone who had just watched a friend get hit by a car.
You slow down. You squint ahead. You look left. You look right. You see approximately zero construction workers, zero equipment, zero activity of any kind. There is a lone orange barrel listing slightly to one side like it’s had a rough week. A few cones. Some gravel that probably wasn’t there before.
That’s it. That’s the construction zone.
And so, because you are a reasonable adult making reasonable observations about your immediate surroundings, you ease back up to 70.
I understand this impulse completely. I want to be clear about that before I tell you to stop doing it.
Starting April 1, INDOT is activating its Safe Zones automated speed enforcement program on I-74 between mile markers 113 and 134 — that’s the stretch running through Decatur and Shelby counties. The way it works is this: there are truck-mounted cameras in the work zone. They photograph your rear license plate when you’re going 11 miles per hour or more over the posted limit. You don’t get pulled over. You don’t see any lights in your mirror. You don’t have any idea anything happened.
You just drive home, have dinner, watch whatever you watch, go to bed.
And then a letter shows up.
I want you to think about that for a second. The experience of getting caught speeding — which used to involve a police cruiser, flashing lights, and a deputy who was professionally polite in a way that made everything worse — has been replaced by the experience of opening your mailbox two weeks later and finding an envelope from the state of Indiana. No drama. No conversation. Just the quiet, efficient judgment of a camera that has no interest in your explanation.
The first offense is a warning. No fine. The state’s way of saying we see you, friend. The second is $75. The third and beyond is $150. Collected fines go to the state’s General Fund, which I assume is the government’s way of making sure none of this feels personal. It’s not personal. The camera doesn’t dislike you. The camera doesn’t like you either. The camera simply records.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because I thought it too: what if there are no workers present?
Good news. By law, violations are only valid when workers are actually in the zone. No workers, no ticket. The system is designed specifically to protect the people in the orange vests, not to generate revenue from a stretch of orange barrels guarding a patch of gravel at 2 a.m.
Which brings me to the part I actually want to say.
Those workers in the orange vests — the ones who aren’t always visibly present but are sometimes very much there, working right off the shoulder while traffic moves past them at highway speed — they’re doing a job that requires a level of faith in their fellow human beings that I find quietly remarkable. They are standing next to a road where people are driving 75 miles an hour, separated from certain catastrophe by a few barrels and the assumption that drivers will slow down.
That assumption has not always been well-founded.
Indiana’s work zone fatality numbers are not great. Nationally, somebody dies in a work zone roughly every other day. These aren’t abstractions. They’re people who drove to work that morning the same way you drove to work this morning.
I’ll be honest with you: I have mixed feelings about automated enforcement in general. There’s something a little uncomfortable about a camera making a legal decision about your behavior without a human being involved anywhere in the process. It feels like the beginning of a science fiction movie that doesn’t end well for the people.
But I also think most of us, if we’re being straight with ourselves, know the difference between I genuinely didn’t realize I was speeding and I sped up because there wasn’t anybody around to catch me. The camera doesn’t change the speed limit. It just changes the odds of consequence. And if the only thing keeping someone’s foot off the gas pedal in a work zone is the presence of a police cruiser, then maybe the camera is doing exactly what it needs to do.
The construction on 74 is not permanent. Whatever they’re building or fixing or repaving out there will eventually be finished, the barrels will disappear, and the speed limit will go back up and you can drive however fast your conscience and your insurance rate will allow.
But the workers standing next to the road while that work gets done are going home to someone. Probably in Decatur County. Possibly your neighbor.
Slow down for them.
The letter from the state isn’t worth it. And neither, honestly, is the alternative.