The neighborhood I grew up with incorporated into a city and they day they did it, the DAY they did it they lowered the speed limit on all their major roads. 45 went to 35, 60 went to 50. How many people do you know drive on a 4 lane divided highway at 50 mph? The unincorporated farm roads next to it are 55 mph. It’s very easy for them to catch people driving 65 because that is the speed of the connecting highways at both ends. I can show you where they hide at the bottom of hills for speeders. It is purely a money scam.
And you know what happens to repeat speeders who are warned by flashers?
They slow down.
And when they slow down, for some stretch of distance and period of time, they drive at a more reasonable rate, and therefore they, and everyone else on the roads around them, are ostensibly safer – presuming that their speed was dangerous to begin with.
And more importantly, not everyone who is warned to slow down by a headlight flash is a habitual dangerous speeder. Some might just be in a bit of a hurry and pushing it harder than they should. Some might be driving a bit carelessly at that time because they’re preoccupied or not feeling well or their kids are acting up in the backseat. Some might not have realized that the limit on the road has dropped as they’ve moved into a more heavily populated area. There are a lot of reasons why someone might fail to obey the posted speed limits, not all of them are malicious or even particularly intentional.
Second. When and where you can say what, or anything for that matter.
I’ll defend to my death your right for the first.
On the second? Get a fucking grip.
Using your logic I should be able to flick my lights on and off in morse code saying “obama sucks” as I drive down the highway. I mean, why can’t I express such a fundamentally political thought while driving down the highway? Surely if the founding fathers were protecting anything, they were protecting free political speech.
I have a new years wish. I hope all you flashing wankers get speeding tickets this year.
That would be up to a judge to decide if the law against your particular conduct of flashing your lights constituted a danger to other motorists that outweighed your free speech rights.
It’s really a bad example. You can speak out, publish an article, or express your displeasure with Obama in a variety of ways. You can only really communicate a police presence in a few small ways.
Oh, and happy New Year to you too, you frigging wanker
You know everyone on the road and can speak to their reasons for speeding? Wow, you’re made of magic. Can I touch your robes?
And making them slow down. And in fact, making them slow down sooner and for longer than the speed trap would. You’re more interested in punitive effects than safety effects.
In your link, one state is listed as having had one case where a citation was thrown out on the theory that the action was protected free speech. The case in question we do not have details of (the Wiki citation is to an article abstract with almost no information about the case). We do not know if the violation was a violation of high beam use, a violation of failure to have headlamps on under low light conditions, or an obstruction of investigation charge.
Before you so carelessly use statements like “many courts,” and before you use your citations to negate statements I make (you will note my assertions are limited to violations of laws requiring/prohibiting specific driving practices), you might acutally make sure that your link is saying what you are asserting.
The free speech concept is most likely to succeed when the charge is one of impeding an investigation. The theory here would be that you cannot be held liable for impeding an investigation if you are simply exercising your right to speak freely. Thus, for example, if you say to a person who is about to be questioned by the police, “You don’t have to tell them anything, you know; Fifth Amendment and all that!”, you cannot be prosecuted for impeding the investigation. But if the state has a law requiring you to drive on the right side of the road, you don’t get to drive on the left side and dispute the citation by saying, “But your Honor, I was just exercising free speech to communicate my distaste for the imperative of right-handedism in the US!”
DC, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia all allow flashing lights to one degree or another.
This was in response to your statement: If you are flashing brights, you are in violation of the law probably in every state in the union. If you are turning your lights on and off, and it is dark enough that you are required to have them on, you are violating the law.
What I said is that the enforcement of speed limits generally causes people to approximate the speed limit. In my experience, if I set the cruise control for five over, I stay pretty much with the pace of traffic the entire time, with a few exceptions. And the exceptions are almost always the ones who I see pulled over a few minutes up the road. This is true regardless of what the speed limit is, which is a pretty strong indication that people are paying attention to and limiting their speed based on that number.
Are you really claiming that speeding tickets have no deterrent effect?
Even if that were true, surely the proper response would be to issue them more often and make them more expensive. Why do you think the proper response is to stop enforcing the speed limit? There is a very well-established causal relationship between speeding and accident risk, and an obvious causal link between speed and lethality of accidents. If people aren’t too worried about getting a ticket to slow their speed, then we should increase the fines or issue more tickets.
I am all in favor of warning other people because so many speed traps are just revenue collections. Parts of Georgia were renowned for setting up speed traps. Governor Lester Maddox took action. There are now laws whereby the police must be visible for at least 500ft and can only book people doing at least 10mph over the limit.
There is a road near me that is limited access, ramp on/off, median, guard rails, two lanes each way - a fast, safe Interstate-style road (Ronald Reagan Parkway, if there are any locals reading this). They put a ridiculously low 50mph speed limit on it and the cops go out every day and collect revenue for the county. No way is their action about road safety.
That is pretty much true. At work I have been modeling the effects of reducing the tolerance for speed cameras and it is immediately apparent that the presence of a speed camera causes drivers to drive at the “speed limit” rather than the optimal driving speed.
I drive past a speed camera every day on the way to work. Although the speed limit is 90 kph (55 mph) the traffic routinely slows to 75 - 80 kph. After the camera everyone goes back to the speed they were traveling before the camera. As time passes every camera becomes less productive due to driver awareness. My next lot of research will be to find out how far from home the booked driver is.
My models indicated that reducing the tolerance for the speed camera by 4 kph (2.5 mph) would double the revenue raised in fines.
There’s a simple test for this in court. Are citizens allowed to communicate this information or not. Can I stand on a bridge with a sign warning of speed traps? Can I verbalize it using a CB radio?
:dubious: During daylight hours I flash my brights at oncoming traffic to warn them about a hazard I just passed. Car in ditch, deer on the road whatever. As I drive 2 lane mountain roads, this happens more than you might think. I really doubt any judge or cop would consider that an infraction.
Truckers flash their lights to let other truckers know when it’s safe to pull back in when they are being passed.
I agree, it’s a point I raised earlier. Common sense prevails when what’s being communicated doesn’t piss the cop off (e.g., “your headlights are off,” or “there’s an accident around the curve!”). I don’t think cops care about such things, and neither do judges. Therefore it’s what was communicated that is the debate, and not the method. Otherwise, it would be an infraction every time.
It reminds me a little of the flag burning debate. Flags are properly disposed of by burning them. Therefore the flag burning bans often proposed are not because the method per se is unacceptable, it’s because of the thought being expressed when it’s a protest. That’s why it seems to me that it’s a first amendment issue, same as with headlight flashing–if it’s okay to flash headlights (or burn flags) sometimes, but only when the message is deemed acceptable to the authorities, it crosses a line, ISTM.
Magiver presented the question well–is this permitted to be communicated at all, by any method?
Didn’t some kids make some money by letting folks know that there was a speed trap in a small town ahead, and then on the other side of town had a sign that said ‘Tips’?
People drive at the speed that everybody else is driving, speed limits be damned.
Yes, I am.
The proper response is not to stop enforcing the speed limit. The proper response is to stop snaking people for money. The proper response is to get out and show the flag, so to speak. You can’t do that when you’re hiding behind a bridge abutment waiting to nail Joe Random doing 71 in a 65 along with the rest of traffic because it’s a money-making activity. I have no problem with the police going after the outlier, the guy that weaves in and out of traffic and goes 5-10 miles per hour faster than everybody else. But the alleged public safety aspect of traffic enforcement does not depend on collecting fines. The same thing can be accomplished via other means, such as motorists flashing their lights at each other.
What is that opinion based on? I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from, but all I’m seeing is the bare assertion. My argument is that obvious displays of police presence, or alerting people to that presence, only cause people to slow down momentarily and then resume speeding. Do you dispute that?
Also, you seem to suggest that we shouldn’t punish moderate speeders. Why? I just don’t see the logic in the “but everyone else is doing it too” argument. Do you object to the citation of litterers who are caught tossing cigarette buts on the sidewalk just because a lot of people do it?
I do dispute that in the sense that speed traps are no more effective at slowing people down for long periods of time. Where they are is no secret except to people who don’t live in the area, who the police prey on for money knowing that the ticket will never be challenged.
I object to the fact that tickets are revenue generators. The deriving of revenue via citations encourages more writing of tickets such that the police do not depend on opportunism, they actively seek things to cite people for to increase revenues (see Waldo, Florida, Lawtey, Florida, and the former New Rome, Ohio, among other prominent examples).
