Police call tickets for moving violation "movers," and Evers agreed that "movers are down."
"There are a myriad of different reasons why that is happening," he said, including an intensified focus on violent crime - meaning less emphasis on traffic.
Nevertheless, "part of our job is enforcement," he said. "It's important that our officers are writing violations when we see them."
While stops by police officers are down, red-light-camera citations have increased as more cameras are installed.
Evers said there had been an uptick in moving-violation citations in the last two months, but he could not immediately provide data. "We reemphasized that this is what we should be doing," he said.
Officers are told that, in the course of regular patrols, they need to keep a sharper watch for traffic violations.
The data on enforcement were generated by the Philadelphia Traffic Court.
The sharp drop in tickets also coincides with higher gasoline prices and a dismal economy, all of which could also be a contributing factor, though ones that are not easy to measure.
Then there is technology, old and new.
"There are more red-light cameras," said Jenny Robinson, public affairs manager at AAA Mid-Atlantic, who wondered whether red-light enforcement was being supplanted by the cameras.
In fact, red-light cameras have proliferated in Philadelphia. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 85 cameras at 19 intersections took 141,571 automated photographs of vehicles running red lights.
And as the price of gasoline has risen, people are driving less, Robinson said. SEPTA and PATCO ridership is up, she said, and the traffic over the Delaware River bridges "is at an 11-year low." And fewer workers mean less rush-hour traffic and less chance of an accident.
The large volume of traffic data produced by the state and city add other elements to a complex picture of the highway transportation scene.
