I was reading this thread just now, and I got to wondering, why don’t police officers pull over and ticket everyone they catch driving over the speed limit?
So here’s my thinking, and hopefully I can word this well enough to get my points across… in the case of vehicle speeds, there’s a very clearly established line between legal and illegal. If I’m in a 65-mph zone and I’m driving 66 mph, I’ve put myself on the other side of that line, either willfully or negligently, but more than 99% of the cops in this country won’t even consider pulling me over. There’s a pretty well established line between legal and illegal in the case of assault, shoplifting, property damage, &c., but if I tried putting my toe (or my fist, as the case may be) across *those *lines, I don’t think it’d go quite as well for me. So I take care not to put myself anywhere *near *the line.
I’m not sure exactly how speed limits are set, but they aren’t completely arbitrary. Someone decided that the number one the sign was the highest (or lowest) speed at which I could safely travel on that road during average weather and traffic conditions. So if traffic typically flows at around 75 mph on a 65-mph road, why don’t they increase the speed limit to 75 mph and ticket every driver they catch going over the limit at that point?
I ought to point out that I typically drive so that I keep up with the fastest traffic on the road at any given point, and I don’t *want *to get pulled over… I just wonder why they bother with a law that seems so black and white, and then let individual officers smear it into whatever shade of gray they feel like.
Also, on review, I don’t think I worded this post very well at all, but hopefully you’ll get the gist of what I’m trying to say.
Speed limits are the like the food guide. The Man overstates how many vegetables you need to eat so your half-assed effort to follow the food guide results in you eating enough vegetables anyway. Just as the speed limits are lower than is safe so your “I’m only speeding a little.” speed is the safe speed. That’s why they don’t ticket everyone. Only the people who they catch exceeding the implicit speed limit.
Radar guns are not perfect. Just because the gun says you were going 66 in a 65 MPH zone doesn’t mean you necessarily breaking the speed limit. But if the radar gun says you were going 75, then you’re definitely breaking the speed limit, and you’re a good candidate to get pulled over.
Because speed limit enforcement is more about revenue than about safety, and the cops know that if they did too much (literal) highway robbery people would get pissed off enough to demand an end to it.
To use the example in the OP, if a cop catches someone stealing a candy bar or a $200 skirt, it’s the same ticket. However, he’d rather not waste 15 minutes giving someone a $68 ticket for going 1mph over when he could wait and probably catch someone going 25 over and give them a $350 ticket.
Also, I’d think regularly pulling people over going just barely crossing the speed limit would have the public thinking pretty poorly of the police.
My (unfortunate) experience with speeding tickets is that they have a set number at which they will pull you over. And the cops have told me this explicitly. On our highway loop, they will not pull you over at 79, but they will pull you over at 80. School zone? Anything over 25. Of couse, if they want to pull you over they will find a reason (failure to signal during lane change, etc.) or if they are hard up for cash they will lower the limit. But as said in an earlier post, they have to walk a fine line between revenue generation and pissing off the public.
There is an error margin for electronic equipment, including speed guns. I think +/- 3mph is the best they can do, and some are even larger. Some speedometers are also not 100% accurate so it’s reasonable that someone might consistently be going slightly faster than is reflected in their speedometer–more margin for error.
But simply put, the reason cops don’t pull over everyone breaking the speed limit by small amounts is because they would never have time to do anything else. Unless we’re supposed to deputize a significant percentage of the population to police this offense, there just aren’t enough cops or hours in the day. There is a speeding culture in this country, like it or not. Frequently someone can be impeding the flow of traffic by going the speed limit, I’ve seen this many times on the freeway. Speed limit of 55 but traffic flows quite nicely at 70, until you get an old granny in the mix.
It’s the police officer’s sworn duty to protect the public safety.
Don’t you think this would be better served by actually patrolling the streets and pulling over people who obviously do way more dangerous things than 10-20 over the limit?
I would certainly feel a lot better (and my attitude toward traffic cops would improve greatly) seeing the cops patrolling my streets and pulling over that guy who just did a 3-lane sweep, or the granny doing 50 in the passing lane of a 65 highway?
I see a traffic cop sitting alongside the road picking low-hanging fruit (for example sitting right near the on- or off- ramp of a major highway), and I have nothing but disdain for them and the government that makes them do this, because it’s clearly just for revenue.
Don’t get me started on speed camera kickbacks to the manufacturers…
I think some patrolling the streets and highways doing speed enforcement is good and serves the public safety. If they weren’t doing that, the average speed would continue to rise to unsafe levels, and you’d have more accidents. It can be overdone, but in general if you have speed limits you need some enforcement.
They have an ACE (Accelerated compliance enforcement??) program around these parts. Every so often, a group of cops picks a stretch of freeway and they spend the morning picking off all those going over the posted limit on that part of the freeway. I think they give you about +5% before they bother stopping you.
The technical answer is the operators manual to many radar/laser units say they are accurate within 2 mph. (years back it was 4mph and some units claim 0.5mph).
I could get tripped up in court writing tickets for 1-2 over when my operators manual says the unit is accurate within 2mph.
The legalese answer is a police officer will only write on something he feels he can get a conviction for. Around here the judges will not convict for anything less than 13 over. So I’m not going to write speeding tickets to people going 8 over.
The reality answer is if oodles of people were getting tickets for going 1 over they would get pissed and demand a trial. When you write for 15 over most people accept that they were speeding and either pay the ticket or come to court and plead no contest and ask for a reduced fine/points. When you write at 1 over people consider it petty and ridiculous and don’t feel like they really did something wrong.If everyone that got any type of ticket rejected any offer the DA made and demanded a trial the courts would be clogged for decades and the system would collapse!
I don’t think the comparison is apt. There’s no clear, black-and-white division point between a safe speed and an unsafe speed. There is no n such that, if you drive n mph, you’re safe, but if you drive n+1, you’re harming or endangering people.
Ideally, cops would pull over people if they are going above the speed limit if and only if they were doing so in a way that could endanger, or at least inconvenience, people. They’d have the discretion to leave alone someone who was doing 80 down a clear, nearly deserted stretch of highway, while pulling over someone who was doing 75 on a foggy or rainy night or who was weaving in and out of traffic.
There are a handful of states where there is no law that says going faster than the speed limit is illegal, only a law that says that traveling at an unsafe speed is illegal. There is a strong assumption that going faster than the speed limit is indeed speeding, but it is a rebuttable assumption. So if you get ticketed for only one or two miles per hour over the limit, there is some wiggle room and you could possibly get it thrown out.
I always personally liked this way of doing it, since my pet peeve is that rural highway speed enforcement is almost invariably done in the places where it is the safest to speed. Obviously, if they were camped out on some mountain pass, they’d only get the one or two really dangerous drivers per hour. But instead they hang out on the straightaways where you can see for miles and they can take their pick since everyone speeds because it’s perfectly safe to do so there. If some of those straightaway tickets started getting thrown out, maybe they’d focus on the really dangerous drivers in the curvy parts.
Of course, in my state (which had no speed limit in the not-too-distant past), speeding tickets are only $40, so it’s not like many people would challenge them anyways.
Montana was the only one, and that was only for a year or two. We’re back to having posted numerical speed limits again, just like everyone else (though ours are considerably higher than most).
It was from December 8, 1995 to May 28, 1999. And it was only on the interstate. I remember there being limits on city streets in Billings.
I drove across the state (eastbound) in July of 1996. Kept it at 105 the entire way, but only because the Grand Prix I had at the time had a governor on it!:mad:
Then we entered North Dakota which at the time had a limit of 70 (I believe they may have since raised it to 75). Have you ever tried to drive 70 after driving 105 for several hours? Felt like we were standing still.
In the third column, there’s either A, P or . The “A” states have absolute speed laws where breaking the speed limit is illegal. The “P” states have prima facia laws, which means that the law is only against an undefined excessive speed, but that exceeding the speed limit is usually assumed to be evidence of such. The "" states are mixed, which means some speed limits are absolute and some aren’t. This usually means the normal state maximum speed limit is absolute, but reduced speed zones are prima facia and so you could theoretically argue against them. Rhode Island, Texas, and Utah are the only states that are all prima facia. But even in those states, actually overcoming the assumption is rare.
Montana, where from '95 to '99 the posted maximum on rural highways for cars during the day was “reasonable and prudent”. However, back in those days the highway patrol more or less decided to enforce 85-90 as being imprudent, which is still about as fast as you have to be going to get a ticket in a 75 zone today.
Of course a lot of the western states essentially had no speed limits in the 70’s and 80’s. When the federal government forced them into making 55 MPH limits, a lot of them turned highway speeding tickets into “wasting resources” tickets that carried ridiculously light fines (I remember my dad got a $5 ticket in Nevada) and no points. The “reasonable and prudent” interlude was in part touched off by the feds returning control of Interstate speed limits to the states, although Montana was the only one that actually went back to no speed limit.
Not all of them. I went 96 past a squad I know for a fact was running radar. My wife leaned over and took a picture of my speedometer. That’s the most I could slow down to when I got zapped.
The question is, if he didn’t stop me going 96 what would he have stopped me for? 100? 500? A zillion?
I generally stop violators at 15 over & above. Gives me at least a 2 mph buffer of what judges will convict on in this county.