I have heard and seen reference to the fact that Montana had a policy in place where speeding tickets were $5. This was done despite losing federal highway dollars.
I am unsure if this is purely an Urban Legend, partially true, or factually based but now dated.
Does anyone know the complete story?
I am interesting in:
When the $5 tickers were in place?
How fast was too fast?
Why did they choose to do this?
Why did they stop?
Is there more to the story?
Please, please, give this a chance to be answered and don’t just wag and joke.
According to a 1989 article, there was never a daytime speed limit in Montana until 1974. Then the oil crisis/fuel consumption concerns took over and the Federal Government mandated a 55mph limit everywhere.
Montana evidently “invented” the $5 ticket, which doesn’t count against you as “moving violation” but rather “an unnecessary waste of a resouce(gasoline).” The ticket didn’t become part of your permanent record, and was unusable by insurance companies to increase your rate.
Ditto for Nevada, at least on quite a few non-urban highways. In the early nineties one or two stretches on one or two highways had their speed limits removed as some sort of a token gesture.
In December of 1995, Montana instituted a new law. The troopers were allowed to determine what was “reasonable and prudent” and the speeding fines were set from $70-$500. Nighttime speeds on the interstate remained at 65 mph, 55 for “other highways.” Points would go on your license.
Yeah, and it was beautiful . We were out there in July of '96. I went through a radar trap about 50 miles east of Billings (the only Highway Patrol unit we saw in the entire state). I know for a fact he was runing radar, but I don’t know why. My wife leaned over and took a picture of my speedometer: 96mph! I still have that picture in my scrapbook.
It’s too bad they did away with the reasonable and prudent thing in 1999.
I read an article about that where the journalist was “embedded” with a Montana State trooper for a couple shifts. They were in a speed trap set up, and watched a Porsche roar by in perfect, Sunny conditions going about 95mph and they didn’t pull it over.
Then they pulled over a minivan the next day going 75 at dusk in the rain.
The trooper basically said they factor in everything, speed, type of vehicle, road conditions, etc when deciding what was “prudent”.
The article also mentions that you can pay your ticket on the spot, and if you don’t have the money on you, the police officer will actually follow you to a nearby ATM to withdraw your fine money.
Is that true?
Minor correction (or nitpick, if you will): Reasonable and proper were the criteria prior to the federally imposed limit – I’d heard about the “basic rule” many years before, and was advised to pay close attention to it when I moved there for college.
Anecdote: shortly after the double-nickel was imposed, a friend of mine was tooling along at his usual 85+ when he encountered the only MHP in a hundred-mile radius. The trooper pulled him over, walked up to the driver’s window, shook his finger and said, “naughty, naughty!” He then returned to his patrol car and drove away. My friend swore this was true; but he’s from Montana, so take that into consideration.
As samclem’s linked NY Times story reflects, Montana had no fixed speed limit prior to 1974. The Feds imposed a 55 mph speed limit in 1974 (during the last “energy crisis”) and told all states to adopt it. Since the Feds lacked (and still lack) the direct authority to tell states what their speed limit must be on any non-federal highways, they (the Feds) tied federal transportation dollars to adoption of the 55 mph speed limit and threatened to withhold those dollars froms states not toeing the line. Since Montana, like every other state, gets a huge chunk of their road maintenance money from federal transportation funds, they imposed the 55 mph speed limit.
The speed limit was treated with complete derision for a couple of reasons. First, expecting people to drive 55 on most of the state highways and interstates in Montana is a joke. These are mostly wide open, light traffic roads, and distances between towns is relatively far as compared to smaller states. NOBODY drives 55. Second, and more to the point, Montana has a bit of the “Live Free Or Die” spirit (with apologies for stealing the motto of New Hampshire) and there was a lot of resentment that the Feds would strong-arm the state into passing a law that was (a) unnecessary and (b) unwanted.
So the legislature made the speed limit 55 (raised to 65 when allowed some years later) but then also imposed a penalty of $5 for violating it. Since the Feds’ justification for passing the 55 mph law was not safety but fuel conservation, the Montana legislature made the penalty for exceeding the speed limit a fine for wasting a natural resource, not a moving violation, with the result that it had no effect on your insurance. (Montana did not use a “points” system for driving violations until the 1990s anyway.)
Yes, you could pay the ticket on the spot. No, the officer did not have to follow you to an ATM and I’ve never heard of one who would. You could pay the ticket by cash or check and if you couldn’t pay it, you were issued a ticket just like any other ticket and you could mail your five dollars in. If you didn’t eventually pay it, you could be called to court in theory, but the truth is no one ever bothered to prosecute those tickets anyway. (But most everybody paid it; it was five freakin’ bucks.)
In 1995, the federal government abolished the federal speed limit. Montana then decided that rather than enacting another numeric speed limit for the State, they would simply invoke the “basic rule” for driving, which requires that all vehicles be operated in a “reasonable and prudent” manner. (And yes, it was “reasonable and prudent,” not “reasonable and proper”.) This was an attempt to hark back to the pre-1974 days, when rural ol’ Montana had no speed limit. But what was marginally acceptable in 1974 was not realistic in 1995. Montana got a largely undeserved repuation as the “Montanabahn” where Hey! You can drive as fast as you want! The Montana Highway Patrol disliked the law due to a steep increase in speeding and in people being mouthy when pulled over (“You can’t ticket me!”) and the federal government disliked it both as a precedent and over safety concerns and began rumbling again about limiting the state’s access to federal transportation dollars. More importantly in the end, drivers disliked it because it didn’t give you any clear notice of when you were breaking the law. (“Can I drive 70? 75? 80?”)
In 1998, the Montana Supreme Court struck down the “basic rule” as unconstitutional as a legal basis for fining a driver for speeding. The case was brought by a plaintiff named Rudy Stanko, who was a well-known “Freeman” white-supremicist nut-job who was a perennial recreational litigant who finally hit a winner challenging the speed law. The Court held that “reasonable and prudent” was too vague to give a driver notice of what action broke the law, and therefore violated the due process clause of the Montana Constitution.
Montana then had NO speed limit until May of 1999, when the legislature set the speed limit back to 65. This time from late '98 to mid '99 was the only post-1974 period when Montana really didn’t have any sort of speed limit, which wasn’t that big of a deal because the Patrol just stopped ticketing for basic rule and stepped up ticketing for careless or reckless driving.
The speed limit was later bumped up to the current 75 on interstates, 65 on secondary roads. And that’s the whole saga.
samclem, **Jodi ** and others, thank you for the excellent and detailed answers. I think this resolves it. I had heard about back around 1988 and it appears everything I heard back then was true. This question actually came up in another thread and I began to wonder if what I remembered was true and I could not recall the source of my knowledge. This was the perfect recipe for ignorantly repeating an Urban Legend.
My mother and her friends would pool together for $5 bills when doing camping, so the convoy could move as fast as possible to Holter Lake back in the 80’s.
Far be it from me to argue with a native Montanan (my father, on whom be peace, taught me the utter futility of that decades ago). As I recall, his take on the subject was the same as the link I posted earlier: that while many states had “reasonable and prudent” as part of the basic rule, “reasonable and proper” was peculiar to Montana. Just one of the myriad things peculiar to, or about, Montana.
“Reasonable and prudent” it is, then. I sit corrected.
According to the Wikipedia entry on speed limits in the United States, Montana’s basic law (MCA §61-8-303) read at the time, "“A person . . . shall drive the vehicle . . . at a rate of speed no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation . . .” [emphasis mine]. The code section in question now talks about “reasonable and prudent.” If the Wikipedia quotation is accurate, the word used was “proper” and has since been amended to conform to the language suggested by the uniform traffic code.
And, upon looking up the case State (of Montana) v. Stanko, we find the Supreme Court of Montana quoting the statute to say, “A person operating or driving a vehicle of any character on a public highway of this state shall drive the vehicle in a careful and prudent manner and at a rate of speed no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation …”
So, quite clearly, it used the term “reasonable and proper.”
I’m relatively certain that, prior to the change in the Montana law in 1995, the term was “reasonable and proper,” as I remember reading it in the back of a AAA travel book when we went across the US in 1959. As a 15 year-old, I was fascinated with all the differences between the states. That term was applied in many Western states, not just Montana.
I don’t think the term “reasonable and prudent” was used by a state until Montana did it in 1995. But I’m willing to be corrected.
When I read the thread title, my first thought was: “A flat rate for speeding tickets? Like you pay $5 a month and can get as many tickets as you like without paying more?”
Annecdotal support: I was pulled over on one of my many family trips across MT on my way from WA to MN. After blasting along all day at 75, a cop nailed me at twilight. He reluctantly wrote the ticket after finding out I was active duty military with a car full of kids and told me that I could either give him $5 then, or I could contest the ticket, in which case I would have to follow him to the county courthouse. I paid, of course. He then told me that I should watch my speed around early morning and early evening, as that was when the cops came out in force to slow people down to keep them from killing themselves.
“It” meaning the Montana Supreme Court may have, but “they” meanining the Montana Department of Transportation did not. So “quite clearly,” it isn’t quite clear.
The Supreme Court decision rightly cites the correct statutory language, but the fact remains that the standard as generally understood was “reasonable and prudent,” not “reasonable and proper.” This was reflected on the MDOT signs that were posted throughout the state at the time, one of which pkbites link shows. If you had asked pretty much anyone what the standard was, they would have told you “reasonable and prudent,” because that’s what the signs said. And it was not presented as an issue to the Court that the legal standard as conveyed by MDOT was incorrect, so apparently neither the parties nor the Court considered the difference to be material.
And I should disclose that although I worked for the Montana Attorney General’s office at the time (and saw the oral arguments for this case), I did not work on the Stanko case. Didn’t work in Appeals, for that matter.
. We were out there in July of '96. I went through a radar trap about 50 miles east of Billings (the only Highway Patrol unit we saw in the entire state). I know for a fact he was runing radar, but I don’t know why. My wife leaned over and took a picture of my speedometer: 96mph! I still have that picture in my scrapbook.
