Yes. The issue is that the cost of a minor infraction is very high. It also hurts the poor and middle class more than the wealthy. Few would complain about an area that is genuinely being served by reducing dangerous speeding. But there are many areas where people perceive that the speed limit is dropped when passing through a jurisdiction for the sake of writing tickets. That’s where people get upset about it.
Radar detectors are legal in most states, why the concern about the police detecting their presence?
You are right that if Thalion kept his radar on at all times, you’d see him before he could get a reading. But, he doesn’t do that. He waits until he sees you, then quickly turns on his radar. By the time his radar turns on, you are already in detection range. When your radar detector goes off, your only course of action is to think of an excuse why you were going 80 mph in a 40mph zone. (Oh, this is Route 80. I see that sign was the Route number. Thanks for pointing that out to me, officer. Now that I know that, I’ll never speed again!).
Oh, interesting is that New York allows radar detectors, but Connecticut doesn’t. There’s a small slice of I.H. 684 that briefly wanders from New York into Connecticut before wandering back into New York. The Connecticut state troopers are out there catching all of those New Yorkers who didn’t realize they wandered into Connecticut.
“I don’t know how fast I was going, officer. The needle pegged at 150.”
The signs at the Virginia border used to say that radar detectors were illegal and “subject to seizure”. Now they just say they are illegal. I assume there were problems taking property from citizens of other states.
I once knew a minister who removed the radar detector from his car each year so he could honestly answer the question on his insurance survey about not having a radar detector in his car. As soon as he completed the survey he put it back.
So you don’t speed except for when you speed.
Me too!
I forget exactly what it is here but in New Jersey the state gets over 90% of ticket revenue. The money the township gets barely pays for the overhead of the court system itself (clerks, judge, PD, prosecutor). Over the last 11 years there have been multiple times when we have been pressured to write more tickets. It has always been to push us to work harder. It has never been to get more revenue for the town. We would not respond well to that. Every once and a while the state will raise the rate on certain statutes in order to help the state budget (like $180 for failure to provide documents up from about $40). I couldn’t care less about the state’s budget. But I still have a job to do and I do it.