Yes, I’m aware it’s a felony (edit: OR misdemeanor), but what if, assuming you weren’t caught on camera, you were speeding a bit and see a cop come out from behind a freeway you just passed, and you take off at an exit while the cop is way back, behind some cars even and you didn’t yet see the lights go off when you took the exit and then hid in the parking lot of a large rest stop? Would that be acceptable for your conscious, if you weren’t clearly trying to evade a cop, beyond a shadow of a doubt? Same thing if you were in a residential neighborhood
I feel like it would still be way too risky and the consequences would be far greater than getting pulled over for speeding, but just curious if anyone feels differently.
For speeding? Not worth it. I speed occasionally and I know I’m doing it every time and I figure getting a ticket is the risk you take. Take your medicine and cop to the ticket.
Aren’t you “evading” the cop in a way in the first place by speeding simply because there isn’t a cop around to see you? Either way you’re trying not to be seen by a cop so that you don’t get a ticket.
Iirc it’s not considered an offense of “Eluding Police” or similar unless the alleged evading happened after the police notified you to stop, e.g. by turning on their siren and lights.
Setting your life up or modifying your driving habits to minimize visibility by police? Ethical yeah, have no problem with it.
Ah but what if you pass them on a hill and they turn their lights on and you find yourself turning right, right, left, right, left, right, right, parking in someone’s driveway and walking away?
So I was driving home from a weekend trip at 2 am in the middle of Pennsylvania. There were two lanes each way with a turning lane in the middle, maybe a 45 mph limit. No other cars on the road but me and I am way over the limit, probably about 80. I come up to a convoy of six or more trucks doing the limit in the right lane (should have been my first hint). As I am just about to reach them I see a car stopped in the turning lane with no lights and wonder if he might be broken down…
Crap, I notice his radar gun mounted to the vehicle. I do not even bother to slow down as he has me dead. My only hope is that he is asleep, so as I zoom by him I am looking in my rearview praying that his lights don’t come on when “pop” there goes his headlights. Shit. At his point I have never had a ticket, so I figure that maybe if I just pull over and wait for him he may take pity on me and not snip my license up on the side of the road considering I am almost double the limit.
I am just passing the front truck now, so I pull over into the right lane then off to the side. At this point (and I swear only at this point) it occurs to me that with all these trucks going by the cop may not have noticed me pull over. So, I kill the car and turn off the lights. Just as the last truck rolls past I see the cop in the left lane doing around 100. He must have chased me for miles. The truckers were probably talking about it over CB, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they slowed a bit to help out.
Needless to say I kept to the limit the rest of the way home. Considering how mild-mannered and law-abiding I am it is good to have an escaping the cops story.
I’m not sure how a cop could ever enforce a violation for doing what you describe. How could he prove that you didn’t intend to get off at that exit all along, or that the parking lot you hid in was someplace you intended to stop anyway? If he hadn’t signaled for you to stop prior to your turning off, I don’t see how it could be a problem (though if he finds you, I’d guess he could still write you up for speeding).
Ethically, I guess it depends on your view of the law. In most areas, there is an unspoken range above the speed limit in which cops will not bother you. In NY and NJ where I do most of my driving, I’ve sailed by cops doing 75 in a 65 zone many times and never had one bat an eyelash. They don’t even look at you if you are under 80, because 15 mph above the limit is where speeding becomes a higher points violation, and they don’t want to waste their time writing tickets for low-points violations. So if the signs on the road say 65, but nothing under 80 is enforced, what is really the de facto speed limit? Ethically, I don’t personally feel as if I’m doing anything wrong by driving in the range that the police don’t enforce.
I may have done this the other day. My Tue/Thur route is on one regularly patrolled by the staties. I see a motorcycle state trooper go flying by me (6 lane completely divided highway) in the other direction and look directly at me (I’m going 73 in a 65, no other cars near me). Figuring discretion is the better part of valor, and knowing how radar guns can be rather unreliable (as in, my 73 might have registered as say 83), decide to take the next exit and follow an alternate route home. Turns out the highway is completely divided, and he couldn’t have turned around even if he wanted to, but he could have radioed ahead to a buddy who could have then pulled me over.
Maybe I was paranoid, and he never intended to get me written up, but I wasn’t about to take that chance.
I’m guessing, it was a long time ago. Much faster than I normally travel due to no traffic and oddly low speed limit for the road as I recall. But yeah, I was going way too fast. The message was conveyed just as well as if he had caught me, believe me!
How much proof does the officer have to offer that the speeding car was me?
Assuming that I’m driving a common make and model and he loses sight of me - then I park up in a mall carpark and the cop comes rolling up - how does he know it’s me he saw - and how does he prove it?
That becomes more perilous because likely the first thing he will do is ask you. If you say that it wasn’t you, now you are giving a false statement to the police and I imagine he might be able to push something like evading the police on you… if he does manage to prove it was you.
Unless they’re behind ME, and their lights are flashing and they’re motioning me to pull over, I see no reason whatsoever to make it easier for them to ticket me.
After all, when you’re on the highway and there’s more than one car, that cop pulling out with his lights on could just as well be for one of them, even if you were also speeding.
They generally won’t ticket you for it either; once about 15 years ago, I was driving in fairly heavy traffic in Houston with lapsed registration and inspection stickers. I actually made eye contact with the cop sitting in the median, but he couldn’t get out after me close enough to put his lights on, so we played this weird game of cat & mouse, where I kept boxing him in behind slower cars and he finally got me by doing some nifty and slightly crazy driving. As soon as his lights came on, I pulled over immediately. He was actually laughing as he came up to the car- first thing he said was “I didn’t think I was going to catch you!”
The issue is, I think, that speeding is not a victimless crimes. It’s not like, for example, smoking a joint, where it doesn’t really harm anyone- there are very good reasons for the laws against speeding, and it does actually harm people. Avoiding a ticket is not the only reason to obey the speed limit.
If the flow of traffic is 80 in a 65 mph zone, then speeding is considerably less dangerous than the speed differential that you would cause by a blind, unthinking obedience to the speed limit.
Now if you’re talking about raw speed, then the tipping point is 45 mph–most accidents occur below that, but most fatalities occur above that. So if you want to be truly “safe,” then never go above 45, regardless of the circumstances.
The bare fact of the matter is that, as with pretty much all traffic violations, he doesn’t have to offer any proof at all. Ever contested a speeding ticket? They are considered civil violations, which, as I understand it (IANAL), means that the standard of proof is “preponderance of evidence,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt” as in a criminal proceeding. In the real world, in the absence of any other evidence in your favor, the court (or hearing officer) will almost always give more weight to the word of the officer than to that of the accused.
I once fought a ticket where the officer who issued it wasn’t even at the hearing. The state police had sent one officer to the court to cover every hearing, regardless of how many officers had written the tickets. The officer they sent had never seen me before in his life; he certainly wasn’t the one who wrote my ticket. Just the same, the hearing officer took his word, and I had to either negotiate the points and the fine, accepting a reduced violation (but still one carrying points), or else appeal to a judge. After sitting there for half a day just to get the first hearing, I had invested about all the time I was prepared to, so I made the deal.
The point is that, if the officer decides you were the one he saw, he can write the ticket, and you will have to deal with it accordingly. There isn’t physical evidence for most traffic violations - a radar gun just tells them that a vehicle was exceeding the speed limit; it doesn’t tell them that it was your vehicle. It’s almost always a case of the officer’s word against yours, and generally, he wins.