STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS The Roanoke Times

Roanoke police Officer K.D. Allen runs radar along Brandon Driveway Southwest, below Grace Street, off Brandon Avenue on Wednesday morning. Police have been cracking down on speeders, and now fines have increased.

STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS The Roanoke Times

Roanoke police Officer K.D. Allen keeps an eye out Wednesday for speeders and other traffic violations along Brandon Avenue. Roanoke's traffic court is busy every day with people who wish to contest their tickets.

Come on, you know you do it.

You spy some open road before you, you're in a hurry, or maybe just feeling frisky, and that right foot grows heavy on the gas pedal. What's the speed limit here? I can get away with 10 mph over, right?

You just hope you don't get caught and most of the time, you don't.

But in Roanoke, the number of speeders nabbed by police has nearly doubled in five years. Police wrote close to 20 speeding tickets a day on average last year.

And starting today, that ticket's going to cost you more. At least 20 percent more. Thanks to a budget amendment this year from Gov. Bob McDonnell, speeding will cost you $6 per mile an hour over the limit on most roads. The fine used to be $5.

In a school or work zone, the new fine jumps to $7 per mile an hour over, and in residential areas, it's $8.

That's a change that reaches into the pocketbooks of several thousand drivers in Roanoke in a single year.

In 2005, Roanoke police wrote 3,432 speeding citations. In 2009, that number hit 6,655, a 94 percent increase.

Police spokeswoman Aisha Johnson attributed the jump to a new emphasis on traffic safety, as well as the department's change to community policing.

"A lot of radar locations are determined by citizen concerns," Johnson said. With officers working steadily in one part of the city and developing rapport with residents, they're more likely to hear about speeding problems.

Officers aren't specifically assigned to run radar, Johnson said. Most officers set up radar when they aren't answering other calls.

Salem, where the number of speeding tickets rose 16 percent over the past five years, takes the same approach.

"If you pass a patrol car in Salem, it's got a radar unit in it, and it's likely on," said Lt. Mike Green.

Roanoke County police wrote 7,574 speeding tickets last year, a 22 percent increase over 2005, but with a targeted approach.

Officers run radar based on complaints, but they start by studying a roadway first, said traffic Sgt. Tim Wyatt.

They'll set up an unmanned covert radar unit that gathers data for several days or weeks to find out when cars are speeding, so officers can return and snare speeders at peak times.

"We have found that the best bang for the buck is with these speed studies," Wyatt said.

For all those tickets, there really aren't all that many bucks to go around.

Roanoke's General District Court processed a record 33,000 traffic cases last year, said District Court Clerk Ron Albright. Yet all fines, fees and other costs collected from traffic and criminal cases together produced just $1.25 million in revenue for the city general fund, which doesn't benefit the police in particular, as some believe.

It's not much of a way to add to government coffers.

"We don't sit around the budget table and talk about the need to increase traffic enforcement to get revenue," said Sherman Stovall, Roanoke's director of management and budget.

Not all speeding ticket money goes to the local government, anyway. Speeding tickets can be written as a violation of either state or local law. If you're cited for breaking state law, your fine and fees go to the state. If you're cited under Roanoke law, your money goes to the city.

Consequently, local police typically use the local law, and state troopers patrolling Interstate 581, for example, cite drivers under state law.

The fine increase will certainly enrich the pot for local and state government, but not by much. According to the governor's office, state government should reap $3.6 million in additional revenue, with local governments seeing another $2.9 million.

Whatever the size of the fines, some try to squirm free of them. Most speeders pay their fines and don't bother with court, but in Roanoke, traffic court convenes every day the courthouse is open, and inevitably accused speeders line up to be heard.

On Wednesday, the defendants didn't even take seats. They queued up in the aisle and waited their turn.

A nursing student caught lead-footing offered that she had just gotten off work and was distracted. She had a clean record and was polite to the police. Could she take a driver improvement class and have her charge dropped?

Judge Skip Burkart decided she could.

Another woman, tagged for going 19 mph over the limit, brought in evidence of a speedometer calibration that found it was off by 5 mph. She was polite, and asked to go to class, too.

Burkart allowed it. "Be careful," he said.

It wasn't my car, pleaded a young man. It was more powerful than I'm used to.

"Nineteen miles over? That's still pretty fast, no matter what car you're driving," Burkart said. Guilty.

In the end, the hope is that they'll slow down.

And not just the person getting the citation.

That's perhaps the greatest power of police running radar. Not the power to fine an individual driver, but the power to be seen doing it, so the driver who leans on his brakes when he sees those blue lights ahead remembers the next time he drives that stretch of road.

"It's all short-lived," admitted Wyatt, the Roanoke County officer. "Unless you have sustained enforcement, then speeds will creep back up."