A four-lane road and the speed limit is 50mph!? That is a truly miserable speed limit. The cop should pay you.
I think Machine Elf’s got the right idea. I’m in Idaho and I posted bond on one of my tickets. I met with the county prosecutor and groveled a bit, I ended up paying $100 bond instead of the $80 ticket but the infraction never showed up on my insurance. Sounds a lot like a plea in abeyance but there was no condition about my future driving.
I’d be tempted to just pay the damned ticket and be done with it though. Good luck!
Wow. Where do you normally drive? I commute on the 55 mph I-94 (Edens Expressway) during off-peak hours, and drivers doing 68 would most likely be in the rightmost lane. The left lane moves at close to 80.
My wife had something similar happen in Virginia last year. Due to serious weirdness between NC and VA, a ticket of this level in either state to a local driver doesn’t carry severe penalties, but an NC driver getting such a ticket in VA facing a 30-day license suspension.
She talked to an attorney and got it reduced, as long as she attended an all-day driving school in VA, in which she learned helpful things like the right way to hit a deer, and why you should carry a blanket in the car with you (answer: because this one couple got lost in the desert while they were tripping balls, and they wandered away from the car while they were tripping balls, and they froze to death, which they wouldn’t have done if they’d remembered to bring a blanket with them while they wandered away from the car while they were tripping balls). I suspect driver’s schools have an excellent lobbyist in Virginia.
Yeah - on the Beltway, driving 65+ is a necessary safety precaution.
The road in question is the Fairfax County Parkway, for NoVa Dopers. It’s somewhat limited access but there are a handful of at-grade intersections, some with lights but several without :eek:. 50 MPH is not an unreasonable speed limit, the prevailing speed is really closer to 60.
Yes - an example on the VDOT website lists this exact scenario.
Bizarre. There was - for a few months - an EXTREMELY punitive fine levied against drivers who exceeded the speed limit by 20 MPH. As in, a single ticket would get you not just the regular fine, but an additional fine of up to 3,000 dollars.
It was only levied against Virginia residents. Someone from MD or DC could do the same speed and only pay a few hundred.
The law permitting that was a) purely for milking cash out of VA drivers, and b) proposed for and lobbied for by a state representative who just happened to own a law firm that specialized in defending driving offenses. :rolleyes:. IIRC, it was repealed in less than a year.
Of all the options available to you, I think the defense of “I didn’t realize I was driving 18 miles over the speed limit - I thought it was only 12,” sounds like the worst way to go.
-In North Carolina, driving above 14 MPH over the speed limit means a 30-day suspension. But if you have a clean record, you can go before the judge and get a prayer for judgment on nearly any first ticket, so the first time is a scared-straight situation.
-In Virginia, there’s no prayer for judgment. But there’s also no very severe penalty for the 14 MPH over the speed limit ticket.
-Virginia reports tickets to NC.
-So if you’re an NC driver who gets the ticket in Virginia, you can’t PFJ it, and they suspend your license.
-Unless you get a judge to knock it down to a lesser offense, with driving school.
I’ve contested every speeding ticket I’ve gotten, and they always reduced the fine
Or violation. I’ve never disputed the facts, but offered an excuse. I was “changing the radio and didn’t realize how fast I was going.” Just admit it and ask for mercy. Cite your clean record. Works every time.
And now Maryland is talking about doing the same thing. It’s the normal fine, plus something like $100 per point assessed for the next few years. I guess they didn’t learn from Virginia.
My last speeding ticket was many years ago in Ontario. I was clocked at 18 kph above the posted limit - 58 in a 40 zone. That would have meant two demerit points and a $200 fine. I decided to go to court to contest it.
When I got there, dressed in my best suit, there were at least 200 people for the afternoon’s traffic court, and there were line ups all over the place for different types of offenses - I can’t remember what all the other lines were about, I just remember I found a line for 15 and above, got in it. When I talked to the policeman in that line, he said “Would you plead guilty to 14 above? There are no points involved and the fine is $75.” I said I would, he initialed the ticket and pointed to the section I should stand in inside the courtroom. 2PM came, and my group of ~40 stood up when the judge asked, filed up one at a time, got our tickets stamped and went down the hall to pay up.
All in all, it was a couple of hours of my time but it had been absolutely worth it. $125 saved and no points against my license. I remember being struck by how much it was like a marketplace.
As others have said, there’s a very good chance that if you just show up for your court date, nicely dressed, polite and well-spoken, and contrite for your offense, the fine and points will be at least reduced. Just go in, say “Yes, your honor; I was speeding, I certainly didn’t realize how fast I was going. I have a clean record, and I’ll never do it again”.
Best case scenario in this would be that the judge could give you a “PBJ”, which stands for probation before judgment; this means that the judge will give you a period of time (six months, a year, something like that) and if you keep your nose clean during that time, the whole thing will be dropped. But seriously, at the very least, they will probably reduce the penalties.
It is very rare to win in traffic court. You will be treated as if you are spouting bullshit and lying, the cop will be treated as if telling God’s truth. Only the most unusual cases are tossed out. If you want to see cops lying, go to traffic court and see them pretend to remember things while reading their notes.
In my state you can get three points knocked off if you attend an eight-hour Defensive Driving class. Unfortunately, if you’re there for another reason (1/2 of my class was just there because the university wanted us to take the class before driving the university vehicles) you can’t bank the point deductions for future bad behavior. It would have been nice to have -3 points…