Sorry. Got distracted in my head rehashing old argument with a guy who just insisted you could get ticketed for not speeding, just because everyone else was.
I was thrown in a Wisconsin sheriff’s lockup for a day for being a passenger in a vehicle that was not speeding on an interstate. (We were Canadians with Ontario plates, which made us easy pickings.)
Every single state in the country will ticket you for “driving too fast for conditions.”
It is just that they must prove you were going too fast, so it typically only happens after an accident.
You may want to go back and read the DMV licensing study materials.
Also, she wasn’t “going the stated speed limit.” She was going ten miles above it even without taking driving conditions into account.
In other circumstances, speeding has been proved even when there were no speed cameras or admission from the culprit (I can’t provide cites - my Google-fu is failing); it’s odd that that hasn’t happened here and it does hint at her not being treated like an ordinary civilian who was involved in a fatal accident.
What you state is a good catch phrase, and makes sense if you don’t think about it, but it is a very faulty argument and logic, and is simply not true.
There are never ‘ideal conditions’ - that just does not exist, the speed limit covers a range of normal driving conditions none of which will ever qualify as ideal, and as conditions worsen then it is appropriate to slow down further, that’s when you can get into the situation like getting a speeding ticket but going slower then the speed limit.
Now I don’t know if this section of road and the conditions warranted a lower speed limit (or to slow down below the limit). In this story it appears that she is not being cited for that, so her speed appears to be appropriate for the conditions.
Perhaps these things vary state to state, but some of you should probably double-check your local laws about speed limits at night and in the wet, because I don’t think it’s usually “this is the speed limit no matter the conditions.”
10mph above the speed limit by her own admission. I think that, if nothing else, we can take her word for that, because why would she lie? (It wouldn’t be enough on its own for the courts, but for us, sure).
I’m pretty sure that if you are scrupulously driving the speed limit, but under especially hazardous conditions, like a snowstorm at night, you’ll be cited for “unsafe operation,” and not “speeding.”
10 kph over. It is Canada after all.
There’ truth to that. 
As far as admitting to being 10 kph over the limit goes, yes, that is a contributing factor that the judge would take into consideration in the civil matter: did exceeding the speed limit cause the accident or exacerbate the cyclist’s injury/death? Does exceeding the speed limit by 10 kph necessarily mean that the driver was driving dangerously or that cyclist could not be at fault too? No, it does not. All the relevant facts will taken into consideration.
As far as not being ticketed or arrested for speeding 10 kph over the limit goes, meh. Being ticketed after making an admission of driving 10 kph over the limit would make no difference in the civil matter, for the admission made at the time would suffice.
The fine plus the victim surcharge plus the demerit point penalty that comes with a ticket for driving 10km over the speed limit on a country road is a whopping thirty bucks and no demerit points. Driving a hair more than six miles an hour over the speed limit on a country road? The prosecution of that is not the sort of thing I want my tax dollar going toward. As Kimballkid says: " It is Canada after all."
You can. It actually happened to two people in Toronto when they were attempting to prove a point by driving side by side down the 400 at the speed limit. They were both charged with obstructing traffic and despite their defense that they were doing the speed limit they were both fined and lost the court case.
This occured because one of them had been given a speeding ticket for driving 115 on the same highway and had their defense of doing the speed of traffic denied.
Basically no matter what you do you’re screwed is the answer.
It’s very doubtful that a dangerous driving charge would stick, on the facts as known: she was driving 10 km over the speed limit, at night, on a wet road. Dangerous driving is a criminal offence, which requires not just simple negligence, or a minor violation of speed limits, but a much more marked departure from the standards of safe driving.
See this summary: Supreme Court of Canada Clarifies Law of Dangerous Driving
The Supreme Court held that did not amount to dangerous driving.
Remember, it’s not that someone was killed that makes it dangerous driving causing death. The first stage is to analyse whether the driver’s conduct was such a marked departure from the norm (sometimes called advertant negligence, or recklessness), that it amounted to dangerous driving. Only if that is established does the Court then go on to consider whether that dangerous driving caused the death of an individual.
Another way to look at it: if her conduct (driving 10 km over the limit, at night, on a wet road) amounted to the criminal offence of dangerous driving, then everyone else who was driving 10 km over the limit on that road that night should equally be charged with the criminal offence of dangerous driving, which does not require that a death occur.
See Muffin’s excellent post on this point. It’s not very common to charge someone with speeding simply for going 10 km over the limit.
Dangerous driving may have been the wrong term to choose, then - I’m not up with Canadian driving laws. I assume you have something, though, which means “driving dangerously” and is not necessarily a criminal offence.
I don’t really accept Muffin’s point. Is it really all that rare to charge someone with speeding ten km over the limit? I mean, obviously people do it and don’t get caught, but in this case? And I never claimed it would actually make a difference to this case - you just quoted me saying that “it wouldn’t mean much.”
It’s just that here you have a horrible incident on the road, and the driver admits to driving over the speed limit. Someone died, so the police must have checked out things like tyre marks, any local speed cameras, etc - it’s not like this is someone randomly admitting to driving too fast at some point somewhere, this is a specific incident where lots of evidence will have been collected soon after it happened. But they haven’t even charged her for speeding. She just gets let off completely. That’s a bit odd.
No, because dangerous driving is the boundary between provincial highway traffic laws and the criminal law. Under provincial highway traffic offences, there’s speeding, of course; driving too fast for road conditions; driving without due care and attention; maybe a few more that I can’t remember.
But, other than speeding, just going 10 km over the posted limit isn’t usually likely to trigger a charge under those provisions. If there’s a single-vehicle accident, with the car sliding off a slippery road, that’s what normally triggers the “road conditions” offence, as others have posted up-thread. And driving without due care and attention is usually something like not seeing something on the road that you should have seen - that might be the closest possibility here - except the fellows on the road were not wearing lights or very much by way of reflective gear, so it may be difficult to prove a charge “without due care and attention.” Even if she was keeping a proper look-out, it may not have been reasonable for her to react in time. Those are exactly the type of judgment calls that the police have to make in deciding whether to charge someone.
Muffin is a lawyer in private practice in the province where this accident happened, and has done defence work in the past, if I recall correctly. Of all the posters on this thread who are talking about what the police normally do in this type of situation, I think he’s in the best position to know from professional experience what the normal police practices are.
I don’t do defence work myself, and I’m not in Ontario, but I’ve certainly heard it said that the police normally give some leeway in going over the speed limit; I’ve heard that it’s not unusual to have a 10 or 15 km grace. If that’s correct, the lack of a charge doesn’t strike me as unusual.
True, someone died. But that doesn’t automatically mean that an offence was committed under either the Highway Traffic Act, nor under the Criminal Code. The police can’t start from the position of “someone died and therefore we have to charge someone.” There can be tragic accidents without an offence being committed.
Unless, that evidence does not point to an offence having been committed.
I live in Ontario too and I have no hesitation to pass a cop with a radar gun out his window doing 10-18 km’s per hour over the limit. It’s so vanishingly rare that I have no concern that I’ll be ticketed for it.
On Ontario country roads and 80+ kph highways it is very rare. There is a set fine for 0-15 over, and a higher set fine and demerit points that kick in at 16-29 over, and of course further categories for higher speeds that grow to eventually include license suspensions and vehicle seizure. Typically, an officer will not ticket for 1-15 over unless it is a school zone, a residential or urban street, or some special situation. When an officer tickets for 16-29 over, if it is on the low side of the category, often the officer will write it up at 15 over, which reduces the likelihood of the speeder fighting the ticket in court. Demerit points often can affect insurance rates, and 01-15 tickets do not come with demerit points, so there is less incentive to fight a 0-15 ticket, for it does not make any sense to fight tickets that are for $45 or less that have no effect on insurance rates for most drivers. So are there a lot of 15 over tickets written? Yes, against 16-19 over speeders, but not against country drivers who were actually going 0-15 over.
No, you are not screwed no matter what you do. All you have to do is not speed and keep to the right.
The purpose of the HTA is to reduce accidents and keep traffic flowing.
Speeding can cause accidents, so it is no surprise that he was ticketed for speeding. That others were speeding is not a defence.
Obstructing traffic can cause accidents, so it is no surprise that the two of them were ticketed for failing to keep to the right hand lane while driving slower than the normal speed of traffic (HTA s. 147) . Again, that others were speeding is not a defence.
His arguments are no more than contrarian sophistry, for they do not even begin hold up under the law.
That’s what an accident is… :rolleyes:
Here in Quebec, neither the family of the victims nor anyone else involved in the vehicular accident would be allowed to sue.
Hate me, I just posted this in order to use the ugly rolleyes smilie.
Just dropping by to say that my best friend’s sister killed a cyclist who really did “come out of nowhere”- investigation found cyclist at fault.
My friend’s sister was in therapy for quite awhile, largely dealing with how angry she was at the man she had killed. I totally get it. His stupid behavior caused his death, yes, but she has to live with having been the instrument of his death for the rest of her life. He essentially made her kill him, and that is definitely something I can see being angry about.
I asked myself what this thread has been missing. Yep, it was missing Stoid.
Around here, if two cars are matching speed in adjacent lanes, whether or not they are doing the speed limit, they can be ticketed for “drag racing.” If it looks to a cop like some kind of game is going on, even just a game to match speed, then it’s illegal. “The roads are for getting from place to place, not playing games.”
I know this, because I got stopped for this when a friend and I were following at a pace (not side by side), because we were trying to figure out if, and by how much, the speedometer of one car was off (it turned out it had a defective gear in the transmission). We were let off with a warning, though. If we’d been side by side, we probably would have been in more trouble.
BTW: I almost clipped a bicyclist the other night: she had a dark colored bicycle, with no reflectors (maybe pedal, but her shoe heels covered them), and just one very dim light in the front-- none in back, plus, she was dressed in jeans and a dark (probably black) jacket, and even her helmet was black. Fortunately, I have a small car, and she was very far over to the right, so that even though I didn’t see her until I was almost right next to her, I didn’t have to do much to avoid her. I think she was missing her back reflector, because she did was a lot of people do, and put on a carrier, then didn’t bother to put the reflector on the back of the carrier. That is actually something you can be fined for, according to the municipal codes, but I’ve never heard of it actually happening, just like I’ve never heard of anyone enforcing the under-18 helmet laws.