Montgomery County Traffic Enforcement
Below, a Montgomery County traffic lawyer discusses how traffic laws are enforced in the area and where major roads in Montgomery County are located. Call today and schedule a free consultation with an attorney.
Montgomery County is right on the border between DC and Maryland. Montgomery County sort of fits in a position between the District of Columbia and other neighboring counties like Prince George’s County and Fredrick County. Those are probably the closest, neighboring counties to Montgomery County. Montgomery County is about 15 minutes or so west of the District of Columbia. The parts of Montgomery County that border Washington D.C. would include Bethesda, Chevy Chase and other parts of Montgomery County such as Silver Spring which are also very close to the Prince George’s County line. So it is between these two areas.
There are two major highways that go through Montgomery County. We have got 495 which is also known as the Capital Beltway and we have 270 which is another highway that sort of connects the entire county to the Beltway. So yes there are two major highways that facilitate the county.
Traffic Law Enforcement in Montgomery County
Traffic laws are extremely heavily enforced in Montgomery County. I would say that Montgomery County has traffic laws that are more heavily enforced than any other county in the state and the reason I say that is the following.
We are dealing with a lot of traffic that happens in Montgomery County that is out of state traffic. There are D.C. drivers, there are Virginia drivers that are driving in Montgomery County all the time because this county borders on Virginia and D.C.
Because of that we see a lot of out of state drivers driving in the county. Out of state drivers may be unfamiliar with the traffic rules and violations here, and they can unwittingly sometimes violate those traffic laws. Beyond that, we also see a lot of traffic laws enforced in Montgomery County because Montgomery County is a very large county and it probably has less violent criminal activities happening than other areas of Maryland like Prince George’s County or Baltimore City.
So the resources of the Baltimore City’s prosecutor’s office and police department of Prince George’s County are usually committed to more violent criminal activities than they would be in a place like Montgomery County where we see a less of that kind of serious level of crime. Here, there are a lot of police officers that are enforcing traffic violations.
Local Montgomery County Laws
Local laws come into play during criminal cases all the time and we see it most frequently when we are talking about Fourth Amendment violations. Anything that can happen behind the wheel of a car can result in a larger criminal investigation.
For example, often times when we see somebody who is charged with drug possession they are not charged with it in their home or charged with it just being on their person as they are walking around. Most of the times drug possession or distribution cases happen when somebody is driving with it in their car, they are pulled over for a routine traffic violation and then ultimately that traffic violation results in the officer smelling odor of marijuana, sees some other kind of paraphernalia in the vehicle and turns the investigation from a simple traffic violation stop into something more serious.
We see that even more commonly in DUI charges which obviously requires driving in order to be charged criminally. Particularly when we see somebody charged with DUI they are always or almost always committing some kind of a traffic infraction when they are approached by an officer and then subsequently the odor of alcohol or slurred speech or watery eyes magnifies the investigation or drives the investigation into something beyond what that traffic stop was.