If we’re going to explore the OP’s question in a fact-based manner (this is GQ after all), it seems to me that it is a required assumption that speeding happens. Otherwise the question doesn’t make any sense, does it? The morality and/or justification of speeding is besides the point.
63 years of driving, no speeding tickets. I could probably recall all the tickets (except for parking) I’ve had in my lifetime, maybe a half dozen. But I have probably averaged only about 5000 miles/year and less recently. Yes I drive over the speed limit, but only a little and keep up with the general traffic.
Yeah, State Troopers in the Chicago area tend to be pretty generous. I mean, it is not unusual for traffic, when it’s flowing, to average at 15 mph over the limit. Sometimes as much as 25 (80 in a 55). Of course, it slows down once a trooper is spotted, but it’s pretty hard (in my opinion) to get nailed for speeding here (minus school zone speed cameras. But I mean in terms of being pulled over by police for a moving violation.) You really gotta not be paying attention. Or on the regular streets in the suburbs.
I second this, even on the Lake Shore Autobahn its nearly impossible to get stopped, the limit varies from 25 (the turn by the Drake Hotel) to 45 to 50, but everyone does 75. Same goes with Irving Park Road around the airport, except for the small stretch by Schiller Woods, always a cop hiding out, everyone slows down even if they don’t see one, just in case.
That’s actually the only place I ever got nailed in Chicago, where 90% of my driving is. Back in 1997. I felt pretty dumb about that one, since I knew there were always cops hanging out there (northbound, somewhere around Foster). (Well, I also got stopped heading in the other direction a couple years later, but just a verbal warning. The cop was right behind me when I was turning from Sheridan to LSD, and I floored it. I was at around 55 during the winter [speed limit is 40 then, I think?] when I realized he was in my rearview mirror, and I just said, ah, fuck it, and just eased off a bit on the pedal but didn’t hit the brakes or make any real effort to slow down. He pulls me over, runs over to my car, and says “What the hell? Didn’t you see me right behind you?” I said “Yeah.” “Well why didn’t you slow down?” “Well, I figured if you got me, you got me.” He shot me a befuddled look and just sent me on my way. It really does take some effort to get a speeding ticket.)
Wow, on Lake Shore Drive, lately I never see them anywhere on it, but then again I only go on it to clear my head a little bit or kill some time. I was only 9 in 1997 so, I would have no idea how they were then lol. I know of a perfect trap for the state police, it’s almost as if they use it as a bottleneck, on RT-83 toward Oak Brook, there is a little stretch called Kingery Highway with K-Rails on both sides, they usually wait near the exit and entrance of this little stretch, almost every time I go near there, I see someone getting pulled over. This is on my way to Downer’s Grove to visit my sister and boy that is another story, those Downer’s grove coppers seem to pull people over for doing 3-5MPH over the limit. God forbid an older car and you forget to turn your headlights on.
The Saint Louis metro area is famous for a short stretch of I-170 that passes through three aging & struggling inner suburban townlets about 3/4mi square each. In one case the stretch of freeway within the townlet is less than 1/4mi long. IOW 15 seconds of driving at normal freeway speeds.
The “police” in those towns run quite a racket there, ticketing anyone they can drum up an excuse to ticket. The cities depend on police fines for most of their operating budget. The now-infamous Ferguson isn’t one of these towns, but it’s nearby.
The typical speed of traffic before and after the townlets’ gauntlet is about 75 and occasionally 80. Within that space it’s 55 to 60.
I’m actually heading out in that direction in about 5 minutes, so I’ll be passing that stretch of Kingery in about a half hour. I’ll keep an eye out.
And, yeah, it does seem that LSD was more heavily policed about 20 years ago. It was certainly known to be careful about cops there. From the Loop to Sheridan, it was not unusual to see up to three cops camped out along the route waiting to nab speeders.
In 50 years of driving, I’ve gotten one speeding ticket, on the day that the 55 mph limit went into effect. I can’t drive 55! I’ve always been a leadfoot, but seem to lead a charmed life on the road. At some point I realized that I’d driven at least 200,000 miles at 20 or more mph over the speed limit. If I ever do get a speeding ticket, it will have been well worth it.
On the other hand, I’ve known people who were speeding ticket magnets. They usually drive sports cars. One friend got a speeding ticket in a parking lot.
You could say the same thing about DUIs, you know.
5 speeding tickets in 40 years, 4 of them within 2 months as I sped past photo radar to pick up my wife at university. The car was registered in her name, even though she didn’t have a driver’s licence and didn’t drive. I ignored the tickets for a few months, then paid them off. The very next day someone from the sheriff’s branch came to our door to arrest my wife for unpaid tickets. After I stopped laughing, I produced the receipt and all was well. So technically, 1 ticket in 40 years for me…
I think a lot of the time when people say “average”, they mean neither “mean” nor “median” but something more like “typical” or “normal”. They would be amused or perplexed at the (true) statement that the average person has slightly fewer than 2 legs.
The OP and his sister are in dispute over whether 2 tickets in 21 years is outside the range of what is considered normal. Numerical averages across the whole of society are a bit of a red herring.
In that case, they’re looking for the “mode,” of course. Average can be any of those things, or something even less precisely defined, so I definitely agree with you. It certainly doesn’t mean “mean” 99.9999% of the time in common speech, as one poster claimed. And it’s also a bit of a fudge word in arguments, because if you have a distribution that skews from a normal one, you can have several correct answers for “average,” depending on which you choose to emphasize.
Since everyone is giving their antidotes, I’ll give mine. I speed, a lot. I’ve gotten more tickets then I can count. I applied for life insurance back in 2014, and they requested detailed records of any tickets I got in the previous 5 years. From 2009 to 2014, I received 8 speeding tickets. I got a few more since then, but since I had children in late 2013, I’ve slowed down and haven’t gotten as many. I haven’t had a ticket in 2 1/2 years since I started my newest job. (haven’t actually slowed down much [unless kids are in the car] but driving less miles, in a known path, which I know where the cops hang out)
I’ve never had a ticket for something besides speeding. I don’t drive aggressive, I use turn signals, and I make complete stops. I just drive fast on clear roads.
FYI, I was denied the life insurance policy due to the tickets. I had to wait 2 years till 2016 for most of them to drop off. I reapplied and was approved in 2016.
Agree. Something like “Is <this> within (roughly) 1 standard deviation of the <middle defined somehow>?” is the question most folks are trying to ask.
More simply: “Is <this> in the fat part or the long tail of whatever the distribution looks like?”
(Bookmarking this thread, because some of this discussion may come in handy as an example the next time I teach Statistics.)
I have never gotten one in 29 years of driving.
In my wild youth I averaged 3 a week. That was before they kept score.
When I first read the question I thought I hadn’t had any since. But, upon reflection I’ve had 3 in the last 27 years. That’s about one every ten years. One was deserved, one was a speed trap and one was questionable. Reasonable distribution.
Crane
Come to think of it, you’re probably right. I’ve seen people, when asked what the average is of something, reply “There is no average. There’s a normal range for that”, or the like. Well, of course there’s an average to that normal range, but that’s not what they mean.
It’d be nice if we could get the mathematically unwashed to drop “average” from their vocabulary and substitute something like “typical” or maybe “expected”.
“Average” suffers from being a half-formed term of art (= “arithmetic mean except when it isn’t.”) which gives it a false air of precision.
The real answer to most (all?) data questions is: “Here’s the distribution of our measurements to date and here’s the error bars we know about. There are other errors we don’t know about. There’s also the future.”
Coming up with the few-short-words answer to what that really means to the naïve questioner is a tall order. It’s a tall order to answer the sophisticated questioner too.