i’m gonna be moving to the NYC area later this month, and one friend told me that i should be careful driving through ohio, cuz if i do, and i don’t have something like 200 bucks on me, they can haul my ass to jail…
sounds like crap to me, but is it true?
and i also heard that CT (where i’m actually moving to) has something like 200 police cars, but only 2 marked ones?
prove me wrong, please…
Lets see…I live just east of NYC. I was returning home from visiting a friend in Illinois. I was on some highway or other. I was doing 74 in a 65 zone. Got pulled over by an Ohio state trooper. Got a summons and was sent on my way. No request for money. So yes its definately crap. Incidently, if you do get a ticket, make sure you pay it. I didn’t, right up until I got a letter from NY Department of Motor Vehicles saying they were going to suspend my license if I didn’t pay it.
I’ve been through Ohio a few times. They are strict on their highways from what I’ve seen.
One thing they do is called “daisy chaining”. The sit 6 or 7 squad cars up on a bridge or entrance ramp. You think you’re safe driving in a pack of cars, right?
Wrong. They clock the front car, and the last car. If both are speeding all the squads race down a pull over the whole pack.
Also, they use “same lane” moving radar, which means they can drive up behind you and zap you. I’m not certain what the fine structure is, but if you are from out of state they want their money NOW! I was told they do take credit cards. This all sucks because the limit is only 65 and the turnpike is sooooooooooo boring!
Then why didn’t they demand it from me? Heck I even had the cash to pay it, but it was never brought up. The trooper gave me a ticket and sent me on my way.
My fine was $50, and this all took place in January of 98.
My source on that tid bit was a guy I know who got stopped there circa 1987. He said the cop(not sure if it was a trooper or maybe a sheriffs deputy) would not take cash, but would take a credit card, right there on the spot. He was told if he didn’t post bond right then and there he would have to go see the judge right then and there. I bet it was a county cop who stopped him! He got popped going 72 when the limit was still 55.
As for the daisy chain and moving radar from the rear…that I saw for my self! One trooper came flying up behind me in a semi-marked (marked but no light bar on top)squad car, zapped me, then changed lanes and took off like a bullet! Startled the hell out of me. This was in June of 1998, on our way to Gettysburg.
Later on I observed the “daisy chain” thing. 6 squads lines up on the side of a freeway entrance ramp.
me me! I got busted just last week in Ohio doing 76 in a 65. 70 dollar ticket, no request for money. but they want it paid real quick, like it’s due today. I saw well over 20 cops in around 400 miles of travel through Ohio and most had someone pulled over. makes the long trip even longer. }: I wouldn’t go more than the Ohio drivers do as they seeem to toll along at just above the limit. I was also in the middle of the pack and I was the ONLY one caught, I asked why me and he said “cause I got you”, like I believe that one. oh well.
I went through Ohio on a road trip last spring, and was pulled over for doing 81 in a 60. This was right outside Cleveland.
After making me and my friends wait for a few minutes, he came back, asked us where we were going, and then gave us tourist tips!
It wasn’t until he let me drive away that I realized he wasn’t going to ticket me.
And, no, I’m not a female. 
greyseal
Connecticut State Police primarily use unmarked cruisers. They only have a handful of marked cars.
The unmarked cars have removable light bars. So sometimes they are on and sometimes the cars are completely discrete.
Fines are unbelievably high. Anything over 70 mph and you are screwed.
While we’re on the subject of speeding in Ohio, I have this question:
It has been mentioned to me, by more than one person, that on the Ohio Turnpike you need to watch your speed but not only because of the cops. According to the story, the Turnpike Ticket you receive when you first get on not only tells the tollbooth worker where you got on, but also when. Supposedly when they run the ticket through the computer to calculate your toll fee, it will also check to see if you travelled the distance in too quick of a time and, if so, they will issue you a speeding ticket right there.
Any truth to this?
As I read this thread, all I keep hearing is Charlie Daniels, ‘Uneasy rider’…"…wonder if anybody’d think I flipped if I went to L.A. , via Omaha"
later, Tom
Another slight hijack…
Last time we got a speeding ticket in IL, we had the choice of paying the fine on the spot or surrendering the driver’s license until it was paid. They give you a little receipt that says you are a licensed driver but that the state of Illinois is hanging on to the thing until you pay your fine. I was taken aback. At the time I believe I was most worried about how this would affect our abilities to get into bars, but…
Unlike states with real state police forces, Ohio’s Highway Patrol is limited to patrolling highways, so they do that a lot.
The two out-of-state drivers I know who were stopped by OHP were asked to pay up right there (by credit card) or come to the local courthouse to post bond. I have no idea what the legality of that is, but the OHP certainly does it.
As to the fancy stuff like lane zapping and daisy chains, they are pretty rare. I have seen the daisy chain pulled three times (in 20 years). On each occasion they publicly announced, a week in advance, that they were going to do something to moderate stretches of road where the local speeds had gotten over 20 over the limit. (The announcement did no goood for our out-of-state visitors, of course.) I’ve never been lane zapped and have only seen what might have been lane zapping one time.
I have heard the old toll-booth ticket story reported for each of the large toll-road states (IN, OH, PA, NY, NJ, CT, MA). If it is true for any of those states, they must issue tickets only when you clock a lot of speed. I never stay at the speed limit on the turnpike and I have never had my ticket looked at. (They do have time stamps, but they would have to guarantee that the clocks were synchronized across the whole state to have such a procedure stand up in court.)
I have seen the daisy chaining routine in CONNECTICUT, not Ohio, where I drove past about 20 stopped cars, and 3 unmarked Connecticut Staties which had pulled them all over in the median which seperates the HOV lane from the regular travel lanes on I-84 westvound heading in to Hartford. I have also seen a Statie waiting in the exit 74 onramp (RIGHT on the Massachusetts border) on I-84 back when Massachusetts had a 65 MPH speed limit and Connecticut was still 55 (I believe Connecticut was the last state in the union to go 65). I had been warned about him, and so slowed down, but I did see him pull out and nab a guy who passed me. I was doing a hair under 70 in Massachusetts (where you can pass a Statie doing about 80 and not get stopped), and when I slowed down to about 60 at the border, the guy wasn’t doing much faster. So yes, I have several eye witness accounts that Connecticut state troopers are pigfucking assholes.
I also have my only speeding ticket in Ohio, and I can report with certainty that NO I did not have to pay it on the spot, but they DID require payment soon (like 2 weeks after the ticket was issued) or I would have to appear in court. As I was living in Delaware at the time, I didn’t particularly feel like going to court in Huron County, Ohio, so I payed it via mail as soon as I got home. The ticket was issued on OH-2 between Toledo and Cleveland. I had gotten off of the turnpike in Toledo, being bored as hell, and drove Rt-2 to break up the monotony. One weird quirk about the ticket, however, was that the officer asked me to get out of my car, and required me to sit in the passenger seat of HIS car while he wrote the ticket. I suppose that way I don’t feel like pulling anything, as I was in HIS car. Kinda weird. Anyways, I was at a point in Rt. 2 where the speed limit went from 55 down to 50, and I was doing 65. Ticket was 81 dollars.
I drive through Ohio a few times a year and they are bastards. I’ve never gotten caught but nearly everyone I know has. I set my cruise control on 64 or 69 and sit back and relax.
I don’t know about the turnpike thing. I don’t think they are authorized to ticket. You could claim it was the wind that helped you or something.
I used to drive through eastern Ohio along I-70 at least once or twice a month last year while driving from MD to my ex-gf out in Columbus. I never got pulled over, although I was always driving faster than most people here who’ve been pulled over said they were driving.
I also never saw the daisy chain, either, but the scariest thing I saw was once while driving alongside a prison truck, transporting prisoners. I happened to have drove in tandem with the truck for about twenty miles, and the prisoners inside the truck didn’t seem so pleased to see me.
I don’t think that is true, but they have another way of catching people on the turnpike. Airplanes. There are lines on the soulder and some guy in a plane times cars to see if the get from one line to the other to quickly. If they do the radio the cops a few miles up the road.
I was on Interstate 675 (a 45 or so miles of highway that forms the hypotenuse of an Icosolese [sp?] triangle with I75 and I70 being the legs. Anyway, the state troopers use air patrols and have pilots that time how long it takes you to traverse two hash marks that are a quarter of a mile apart. I know now to be on the lookout for light aircraft following along the highway. The one and only time this happened to me the trooper literally walked out into my lane of the highway and flagged me down. I felt like pretending I did not see him and running the bag of puke over! Seriously!
Always enjoyable to see the happy responses of people who have been caught breaking the law and seem to think there is something wrong with that.
A couple notes:
1: You can’t be issued a ticket by a toll booth worker; they aren’t peace officers, and don’t have the power to ‘seize’ you or to issue a summons to court (which is what a traffic ticket is). The turnpike clocking theory has plenty of other holes in it, but let’s shoot it down with some basic constitutional law.
2: It is likely that the available remedies for the State Highway Patrol vary depending on the offense of which you are being accused. However, I have always felt that any attempt to procure immediate payment of a traffic violation fine is nothing more than a thinly disguised shakedown. I suspect that, where such has happened in Ohio, the officer in question was representing a county, a township or a municipal corporation (here, that can be a city or village). One could always ask the Ohio State Highway Patrol what the policy is. As for snagging the license, I have heard creditable stories of that from other states, e.g. Michigan. My response would be simple: it isn’t property of your state, you can’t have it. Of course, this might subject you to other measures designed to ensure that you comply with the law of the state in which you already stand accused of a violation…
DSYoungEsq, that makes sense about the tollbooth employee not being able to issue a ticket (if they’re not peace officers - although you could argue it shouldn’t be difficult to for a state to give them limited powers as such).
This however brings up another point. There are states where the automated toll booth will take a picture of your license plate if you don’t throw your 40 cents in the basket. They just mail you a ticket then. (I’ve seen similar “picture leads to mailed ticket” programs for running red lights as well.) How is that allowable?
Couldn’t the computer that reads the tollbooth ticket also activate the camera to take a picture of the plate of a car that travelled the distance too quickly?