Holy crap. Yeah, I’m thinking maybe my idea of speeding is a bit different, then. A hundred times?
You do not have my attitude about this discussion remotely correct. I highly respect anyone with patience, and a person with even just a radar gun and a trained eye can nab someone with one. I’ve heartily admitted it in this very thread. Sadly, a large number of of practitioners of actual police radar and laser equipment aren’t particularly skilled at their operation. I’ve had certain officers continue to spray me with lidar until I was perpendicular to them, even though I was going the speed limit the whole way, because they were doing the same thing to every car that came by on that lazy day and I knew about them for quite some distance. If he was pulling the trigger to bug me, I was hanging out in the fast lane to bug him.
And well, if i get a ticket after getting the detector, it’s because I was an idiot, I wouldn’t blame it. I proudly leave it there on the windshield when I get pulled over. It’s the same conversations as it was without it. You ever decide “Well, they’re a nitwit who’s going to run off the road at the next curve, but at least they don’t have a detector, so I won’t write them a ticket”?
Again, nothing’s going to save you from a cop that’s pacing you. I’ve certainly been nabbed by the cop that said “I didn’t even turn on the radar, I saw the cord hanging down”. We both knew I was traveling much slower when he actually got up to pacing me, and had a nice conversation about it and the car. I have ultimate respect for the guy who sees it, and just creeps up behind me until I look up and think “That suburban has a white hood. Dang. Well done. Well, I’ll just hold this speed until he turns on the lights. Its the most honest nab I’ve been a part of in a long time”
So, no, I’m far from an advertisement for them, but I do know how it works in the real world.
And hey, if it’s any comfort: I’ve dumped folks (yep, plural) who were harassing me on the freeway into the hands of your bretheren at “Certainly going to get a ticket (and they did)*” speeds because I knew the guy with the radar/lidar was there and waiting for them because of the detector.
Yeah, but that’s only a rough count. It could be more, but it’s at least nearly that.
*And now I have a song title with no lyrics.
There can be perfectly justified reasons for that.
Laser guns do not operate the same as radar. Depending on the grade of the road, weather conditions, etc it can sometimes be hard to get a reading and an “err” message is displayed rather than a speed. If the road is bumping or the officers hand isn’t steady the beam with not aim properly.
He could have been tracking vehicles performing a traffic history. Officers are not required to lock in a speed once obtained and can continue to clock a vehicle.
It could be that he hadn’t done traffic for a while and was using a methods and standards technique to re-acclimate himself to estimating speed by obtaining the speed of vehicles multiple times and observing said vehicles while knowing what the speed actually is. Hell, I can go weeks without running speed checks. All the other calls take priority, you know.
Anyway, I nail a lot of people who have so called laser detectors. And I mean the good ones like Valentine, Passport and I got someone a week ago with that new Uniden R7 that’s supposed to have insane range. I’ve got a little cubby area I like to park in and then zap rear license plates after the vehicle has passed me. Laser detectors aren’t very reliable when the laser is coming from the front. I’d like to know how yours is when getting zapped from the rear.
It was a state trooper on the tollway, so the idea that he was doing something like a traffic survey seems pretty thin. Either way, I’m sure you know lidar doesn’t work at detecting speed on an object that is traveling perpendicular to it. By the time the detector stopped going off (I was the only vehicle visible on the road at the time), he couldn’t possibly have been using the device correctly.
The confirmation bias I was accused of earlier seems to actually be at play here. You only know of the ones you catch, not the ones that get alerted and slow down before they reach you. The folks you nab may just not be paying attention to it. After all, most plane crashes are attributed to operator error. Aircraft certainly work, even if they don’t always stay in the air.
I didn’t say he was taking a survey. A traffic history is multiple speed readings from a singular vehicle and it is a common, trained technique. If I had to guess I bet he was having problems getting a reading and just got persistent. Sometimes the little dot in the scope doesn’t stay on the plate.
BTW, what kind of numb nutz has a detector, speeds, but doesn’t pay attention to the detector he’s counting on to save his arse? Sounds like an additional charge of inattentiveness to me. 
How many points on your license and how do you get insurance?
I think the problem is that actually getting a victory would be extremely difficult and expensive. It’s more likely that it’s going to make the prosecutor look like he’s dumb and wasting funds on a useless endeavor, not something that will give good PR for him.
The editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has praised the Cannonball Run drivers for their ‘‘accomplishment’’.
Hey, they managed not to kill or injure anyone else, so why not encourage more would-be record-holders?
Well, I thought we established that earlier in this thread (points thumbs at self). THIS KIND OF NUMB NUTZ!!! Yeah, if I got charged with inattentive driving or something for having the radio up too loud and not hearing the thing, I wouldn’t fight the state on it.
Texas didn’t seem to have any points system whatsoever when I was young. I had a friend who ran from the cops one night, got fourteen tickets in one night for his trouble, and they didn’t even attempt to take his license. Around the same time I had an acquaintance who was in danger of the state taking his license, and I remember looking over his driving record from the court filing and my mind boggling at the number of times he had multi-ticket nights and triple digit tickets on his bike. I don’t know what the states’ trigger was to try to take his license, but I would have probably made the move earlier had I been in charge. At 19 or so, he made my 30+ year driving record look tame.
Now, around 2000, the state did put in some kind of limitation system. I don’t remember the particulars, but one year I decided to just pay the tickets instead of going to defensive driving or getting deferred adjudication on them. And one year I hit the number that sent you to court to argue for your license on the nose, which was far short of my previous record number. I went in, and argued that if I had decided to do anything to expunge my record on one of these tickets, or fought one successfully, I would not be in front of her today. She gave me three months probation (don’t get another ticket for three months), and the matter would be dropped.
Since then, and often before, I opt for deferred adjudication on them if it’s available. Just about any speeding ticket that isn’t more than 25MPH over is eligible in Texas. The terms are usually reasonable - last time I just had to pay the ticket in full and not get another ticket for 24 hours - and the ticket is technically dismissed. Doesn’t drive up the insurance rates, and doesn’t affect your long term status as a driver. It’s a system that favors the wealthy, but I don’t know of much in this world that doesn’t.
And really, even when the state was thinking about revoking my privileges, my insurance rates did not increase noticeably. Getting into wrecks seems to be what drives up your rates here, for the most part. Even if you’re terrible enough to get your insurance company to drop you, if the state is willing to issue you a license, someone has to sell you insurance. You get to be in the ASSIGNED RISK POOL! The ARP is a big ol’ shit sandwich of drivers, and each insurance company gets to take a bite until they’re all eaten. The rates are sky high, but I doubt it actually covers the risk the insurers take on with this group of motorists. My sister was in the ARP for awhile, and she was in a lot of wrecks before the insurance company decided to drop her in there. In order to keep my rates low, I had to sign a doc saying I would not allow her to drive my cars. And I wouldn’t let her drive them before then, I loved my cars, and she drove like a loon. Far as I know, she still does, but she doesn’t drive often enough to keep her ARP status.
Not true often enough to be reliable. IME the mere word of the officer is enough evidence to get the ticket to stick.
Maybe.
I bet these speed runners all use a common route and a similar schedule. I bet that somewhere along that route there’s a place that’s relatively populous and also coincides with a time of reasonable traffic during the time they go through. If I lived in such a place, I’d applaud a local prosecutor who went after assholes who decided to drive very dangerously through my regular commute to win some bullshit speed record. But maybe not.
So how is “the word of the officer” not “direct evidence of [the jurisdiction’s] own”? My point was that the statement of the drivers wouldn’t be enough to convict. There would need to be some recording of the offense (photo, other kind of log of speed) or eyewitness testimony.
Exactly what I wondered. In a parking lot, I drove slowly into a planter I didn’t see, denting the car front. A month later I closed a hood wrong and bent the support member. CSAA counted both as moving events and jacked up my premiums. Actual traffic moving violations? Those would get me grounded fast in California. A dozen tickets in one night? I’d make local news.
Well, that’s kind of an apples to oranges comparison. If I have a wreck that was my fault which costs the insurance company money, you’d better bet my rates are going to go up. I’ve bumped a curb hard and bent a wheel and a-arm, had the insurance company cover it and my rates rose some. Insurance companies are very sensitive to things that actually cost them money. They don’t seem to have counted them as moving violations, they seem to have counted them as accidents.
Now, a speeding ticket is so common, I doubt it actually registers much in their algorithms. Most people have one or two (even my mom had at least one), so it’s not a great indicator of who’s going to cost them money. Heck, my sister actually didn’t speed much (I can’t think of any speeding tickets she had, her worst habits I remember are following too close and generally not paying attention), but she was a bad enough driver to get into the assigned risk pool. Now, there are other more extreme charges such as contest of speed, exhibition of acceleration, unsafe lane change, running a stop sign/light, leaving the roadway, and unsafe driving (I’ve known people who have been charged with each, never been charged with any of them myself) that will affect your insurance rates. They’re a lot better indicator of who’s driving like a loon and going to cost you money, partly because they’re more rare.
And again, anything in TX less than 25+MPH over will qualify for deferred adjudication, and your insurance need never know. In addition to that, if you haven’t already taken it this year, you can take a driver’s safety’s course (defensive driving? I don’t know the proper name) for tickets that are less than 25 over (iirc, it may be percentage based: IANAL). It’s even better than deferred adjudication. Not only does it usually cost less than the ticket – your insurance company will never know about your sins, and the state goes and tells them that you took a driver’s safety course instead, which they’re required to give you a 10% discount for. My parents required me to take the course for my first ticket every year when they were paying my premiums. They probably would have sent me there for the yearly discount anyway, and my first ticket a year after the last time I took the course was just the event that reminded them “Oh yeah, he’s due!” Can’t say I blamed them, and yeah, it’s a racket.
My friend B.J. (yep, that is what we called him, no Bear) who actually racked up 14 tickets in a night would have ended up on the nightly news if there was any footage of him. His run was pretty spectacular to be honest, if totally stupid and pretty much needless*. I was not in the car, but the passengers all corroborate his story. The car was pretty much built to race (short, very short distances), and would not only cross 150MPH, but would do it quick. However, it had a fatal flaw that we wee engineers had noticed, but not fixed. If it got hot it was prone to vapor lock and stall. After running from the cops since Oak Cliff, he got to an intersection in Arlington, came to a red light with no flashing lights visible in his rear view mirror, so he came to a stop to make sure he could make a legal right on red**, and it stalled. He gave it a few cranks, figured out what was up, then got out and waited by the side of the car for about a minute and a half before the cops got there. Then, when the cops from three departments showed up, two departments beat his ass while one (Arlington, who had chased him the least distance) watched. The passengers just got threatened. Don’t run from the cops, folks. If you see Christmas coming up behind you, pull over as promptly as you can, be nice, and don’t argue about shit unless it’s goddamn important. If you want to argue, there’s a courtroom for that. B.J. was probably a better driver at 17 than I am now in terms of controlling a car (hell, he daily drove that 12 second or so no ABS, no traction control, just slightly modified suspension monster) and he was still lucky that he was the only one who got hurt. While I might not really approve of the cop’s actions, I can certainly understand them. They didn’t sign up to be in Le Mans or Deathrace 2000 that night, and even without a minute and a half of charging along looking for that car after it had disappeared, I would have beat his ass if he had taken me on that ride against my will.
*It was all to avoid a speeding ticket, which I will attest is not the greatest thing, but absofuckingpositively not worth doing all that.
**Yep, folks are weird in what laws they will obey and not obey.
I can’t find anything current, but in Illinois in 2014, this article states insurance rates go up by about $125 a year for a speeding ticket.
I don’t think speeding tickets are nearly as common as you think. Like I said, I think the last one I received was in 1998, and I almost always drive above the limit on the highway. Here, though, you can keep it off insurance I believe up to twice a year by going to traffic school (which now can be done online.) I mean, this is pretty much the only reason people go to traffic school – to keep the ticket off their record so it doesn’t hit their insurance. There’s no reduction in fine by going to traffic school and, if I remember from my experience in 1998, it was actually more expensive than paying the ticket outright.
Obviously, your state and your insurance companies will vary.
I think you need a cite to support the claim that most people have one or two speeding tickets recent enough to show up on their driving record (most states stop reporting them after 1-5 years). While a lot of people probably do have an old speeding ticket from their younger days (like I do), I really doubt the claim that the majority of drivers have one or two that will come up when an insurance company pulls their driving record.
Not that it matters, but as I like to be factual and correct the record when I misremember, I just realized I did receive one out-of-state in 2007, as well. So I guess it’s only been 12 years since I last got one.
Around 7% of of drivers get a ticket in any given year: What to Do After Getting a Speeding Ticket
(No, they don’t describe how they arrived at that figure)
So, it’s probably more common than it is from your perspective, and less common than it is from mine. Now, certainly some of those drivers are the same drivers across several years, but it’s not a rare occurrence. I never said most people have a recent ticket, but it’s pretty common. It’s the most common traffic citation, easily. Seems to me that at any given time, somewhere around 1/3 of drivers could easily have a ticket that could show up on their record.
$125 seems like a lot, but it actually calculates out to around 9-12% of your bill. Move to another place or get a cheaper to insure car and it would disappear in the noise. My sports cars and faux rally car cost around half of what my econobox costs to insure with the same coverage, the SUV is slightly more expensive than the econobox. The difference in the prices between the level of the cheaper to insure cars that are far more capable of speeding and the more sedate ones that are expensive* is far more than 12%. Go figure.
Or, if you live in TX, go take defensive driving instead and get 10% off instead of having your insurance go up. After that, go for deferred adjudication on the tickets that apply and your insurance need never go up. Even with my apparently unusual record, almost all of my tickets qualified for those.
I don’t think I’ve made such a claim, so I don’t think I need to. If you point out where I have, I will happily retract it. I’ll explain the quoted part of my post instead. My sister had almost no speeding tickets, but had enough wrecks to end up in the assigned risk pool. During my worst period of speeding tickets (even when I got all civic minded, and stopped hiding them from insurance with legal tricks), had one wreck that was my fault. So, how many speeding tickets you have isn’t a fantastic predictor of how likely you are to crash. As several people have demonstrated in this thread, speeding tickets aren’t even a fantastic indicator of how often you speed. The fact that even when I had a few years when the insurance companies knew of my behavior and didn’t seem to really raise my rates, much less drop me seems to indicate they don’t think too terribly of it.
I like to be factual and all, too. I remember that I actually did get one other warning from a cop in my pre-detector days. But, it was for doing a burnout in front of a cop (for reasons too embarrassing to relate here), not speeding. I got off in that case because he thought my car was stolen (for reasons too mundane to relate here), threatened to shoot me if I moved, and found out he was probably wrong (he was).
*I was honestly surprised to read this on my insurance statement. I’m listed as the primary driver on the econobox, the faux rally car and the sports car. My wife who has one speeding ticket in her life is listed as the primary driver on the SUV, the most expensive car to insure. The rarest car is the cheapest. I can come up with lots of theories, but I’m not an actuary by any sense.
No, that actually sounds about right to me. I would have guessed closer to 10%, but something in that general ballpark.
Totally missed the edit window, but the study used for R&T’s article here indicates that 16MPH over is the median ticket speed, so my general feeling about TX’s tolerance appears to extend to the rest of the nation, in general. On top of that, if you do a lot of driving between Fri-Sun, you’re more likely to get a ticket. That bears out my experience as well, because the lamest ticket I’ve ever gotten was for something like 74 in a 70 in an '82 Escort, just a few MPH short of its 82 or so top speed. I passed no one, no one passed me, and no one passed us while he wrote the ticket on that lonely stretch of I-35W that Sunday afternoon. I think the Cowboys were playing in the super bowl, and he was probably so bored it was a good excuse to see what the long haired guy with the plastic skulls hanging down from the rear view mirror was doing (yes, a stupid decoration, I knew it at the time).