To legislators and impatient Utah drivers: Slow down and find a better route.

A bill to prohibit traffic ticket quotas has passed the Utah House and will head to the Senate. Its message: The sole motivation for prosecuting a traffic violation should be the breaking of the law, not the gathering of income for local government.

On this we would readily agree. But it's not easy to identify a quota. What some call a quota is to others a measurement of a police officer's job performance.

The measure has roused questions about enforceability and objections over the bill's impact on the management of police departments and Highway Patrol. Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clinton, said the bill would cause trouble. For instance, it would be more difficult to discipline officers who don't want to be bothered writing traffic citations.

Part of a police officer's job is to clamp down on traffic offenders, but without some standard of measurement it's hard to hold an individual officer accountable for the amount of enforcement he does. Without a way to measure job performance lazy officer could argue that there is no standard that he is expected to meet.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Neil Hansen, D-Ogden, denies the bill would make poor performers immune from discipline. But saying so doesn't make it so.

Some good people deny that revenue-generating quotas exist. For example, Rep. Richard Greenwood, R-Roy, a Utah highway patrolman for 25 years, said he has talked to many officers and they say they don't have ticket quotas.

That surely must have raised some eyebrows in the Legislature because Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman, a former West Valley City and South Jordan policeman, has been quoted as saying: "I worked for a police department and had to write three tickets every day. That was a quota and they exist."

By contrast, backers of the measure say that if quotas don't exist, there should be no problem in prohibiting them. It's like banning unicorns from state parks.

The debate turns on the aforementioned hang-up with the word "quota." While a department may say it doesn't have quotas, it may have performance criteria. The trick is how to tell the difference. We think performance criteria are a good idea.

In 1994, New York City instituted a system called CompStat to measure criminal activity and the police department's response. Detectives who hadn't made an arrest in years suddenly began collaring suspects. The Big Apple's crime rate plummeted and CompStat gets some of the credit.

The lesson? If you want something done, set a standard of measurement. Law officers are like other people. When you measure their performance and hold them accountable, the game goes up a notch or two.

At the same time, a city's financial spreadsheets tally the revenue from traffic tickets. It's a regular income stream, year after year -- one that the governing body of a city would be loath to give up. If revenues sag in this category, it's plausible (if creepy) that elected officials could lean on chiefs of police to set "performance" policies that will get the numbers back up.

We can all agree that's wrong. But it might be hard to catch a city doing it. Quotas, if they exist, will always wear a label such as "performance standard" or "safe driving program" or some other euphemism. They can be enacted with a wink and nudge, as opposed to a memo.

But if it's impossible to pin down what is or is not a quota, then the proposed law doesn't have much use.

Police don't really need to trump up charges. Violators are everywhere. Yet many drivers believe that their cities and towns abuse the intent of traffic statutes to pad city coffers. If they simply obeyed the law in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue.

Police serve in the sometimes tricky nexus between the rights of free citizens and the need for government to impose order. It's a tough enough job without a city putting them in the position of tax collector. And public perception that police are, in fact, tax collectors is an even greater disservice.

There is an easy solution. Since drivers operate motor vehicles under a privilege granted by the state, let the cash penalties for violations of that privilege flow to the state, not to local city government.

This approach solves several problems at once. If traffic fines went to the state, all motive, and thus all suspicion, would be removed from local governments. A cloud of distrust would be lifted from police. Officers would be able to focus on enforcing the traffic laws. Motorists would have to face the reality that it was their own bad driving, not the greed of government, that earned them a ticket. And police departments could establish performance criteria without being accused of ripping people off.