Years ago, doing 70 in a 55 on I90 in upstate New York. I was in right-hand lane. Cars were flying by me in left-hand lane. I was stuck behind a tractor trailor headed toward a one-lane stretch & didn’t have an opportunity to pull out and pass, otherwise I would have been doing 80-90 like the guys in the left lane.
Cop pulls in from left-hand lane and cuts in behind me. Ticket didn’t have a fine on it. I was supposed to mail it in with my plea. If guilty, they would mail me my fine amount, or I would need to go to court.
I asked the cop about the cars in the left lane all going faster than me, and he gave me some crap about how I was doing “70 in a 55, and right in front of a police officer. That’s not very impressive.” (as opposed to the guy in front of him doing 80-85.
I blew off the ticket he gave me. I lived several states away and wasn’t about to return to fight the damn thing. Got a nasty letter saying the state of NY would request my state to suspend my license. I wrote back a letter detailing the conditions I stated above, admitted I was speeding, and said I wasn’t paying. Never heard another word.
Last year my husband got pulled over doing 10 over just before Oceanside near the humps. We were the last car in a group going around that speed on the left. And the CHP pulled up beside us and pointed for us to pull over. But I agree with you that people speed especially from SD to LA.
Getting speeders on the highway is like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ve yet to be on a stretch of highway anywhere in the USA (and I’ve been to all 50 states) and thought the limit was too high. Even in western Texas where it’s 80 it’s easy to go 95 or more and not feel like you’re going too fast. I’ve never ,ever, ever, not even once in 28 years wrote anyone for going less than 15 over. I’ve pulled people over for going 9 over but never wrote for anything under 15 over, highway or city street.
To the OP: it has to do with the court (i.e. judges) of the jurisdiction. I’ll tell you that in a certain, heavily populated county of my state the judges will not convict anyone unless it’s at least 13 over. This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.
Where?
The fastest ticket I ever wrote was for 76 in a 25. This was in the 80’s so I don’t remember the fine amount. It was not a felony. I was a back up officer
on a traffic stop on a guy going 140 in a 55. Also in the [late] 80’s. Also not a felony.
This was Wisconsin. there are 49 other answers to my "where"question.
A freeway is generally defined as a divided highway with no at-grade crossings. The US Interstate Highways are all freeways.
I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket on a freeway (knock on wood), despite my usual habits of A) going 10-15 above the speed limit and B) pretending all freeways have a 70 mph speed limit.
I used to drive the NY Thruway from Rochester NY to Albany NY twice a week. ~225 miles of straight flat boring road. I’ve been pulled over several times, but never got a speeding ticket (there). Generally in those podunk towns it’s all about making money so they pull you over for speeding then write you a equipment failure ticket, and tell you if you try to fight it, they’ll conveniently remember that you were speeding.
I routinely floor it on an on-ramp; it’s not just a matter of a quickie adrenalin rush (tho that’s admittedly the main motivating factor :p), but also matter of matching the speeds of the cars already out there. Well it was dark one night, I went onto the ramp and did my thing, and, right before I hit the 60 MPH limit, I glanced at the headlights of the car behind me, and a voice inside my head said, “Hey dumbass that’s a cop!” I kept her at sixty all the way to and past the merge point, and the cop (I could see the light kit on top of the roof by now) tailgated me for about a mile, then passed me without lighting me up.
A friend of mine on a trip from Toronto to London Ontario for work, got a ticket both going there and coming home. One was for 160km in a 100 and the second for 165 in a 100.
My personal me favorite was driving through Northern Ontario - speed limit on that hwy was 80km. I was doing 120, saw the cop and slowed to 90. He pulled me over and yelled at me for not at least slowing down to the actual speed limit but didn’t write me a ticket.
72 in a 55 on 270 in St. Louis. I think the fine was around $60. I was 17ish - wrote a check and completely failed to tell my parents. They were more than a little pissed when it finally caught up to their insurance, but by then I was 18 and heading off to college, without a car.
What I’d really like to know is how fast you have to be going to get pulled over on 270 just outside of DC. I know people do get pulled over, but how fast were they going???
80 on a 65 in the middle of butt fucking nowhere. I was on my way to Mammoth and the cops just love giving the tickets there. I wasn’t even trying to speed, a conversation got really interesting about the same time the road started going downhill and I picked up some speed.
One other time, cop caught me weaving through traffic going 75 on my way to Simi Valley, I saw him behind me, but took a little longer to pull over then I should have. Fortunately, the few extra seconds let me pull over after a bend in a freeway which revealed an accident. The cop just gave me a warning so he could help out with the accident.
And once, when I had first started driving, I was on my way to a fishing trip and a cop caught me going 115, he spotlighted me, turned on his sirens but he ended up getting on another freeway. I really lucked out on that one, he must have got a really important call.
I read an article in the Toronto sun about two years ago, the OPP was conducting a speed blitz on the 401 and some guy from Quebec got nailed six times in about a 45 minute time frame and the last time, the OPP pulled his plates and he had to call a buddy from Quebec to come and pick him up.
Me and a friend drove back from Calgary , where the speed limit to the Ontario border is 110, soon as we crossed over the speed dropped to 80 and we had the bad fortune to run into an infestation of OPP doing that same type of blitz that the poor quebec guy did.
I once got a ticket doing 110 on the I-5 from San Diego to LA, normally a 65 zone. It was late, past midnight, and I just wanted to get home. I got pulled over and told the cop what I just told you. He told me how dangerous it was. I thought about it and agreed. For some reason unknown to me, he let me off easy and wrote a ticket for 90.
What can I say? I was young, dumb, and invulnerable. Haven’t gone faster than 80 since, and these days it’s usually 55.
ETA: As an aside, years later on the same freeway, I got pulled over two weeks in a row by the same cop. One week I was going 80 and got a ticket. No contest; I was guilty and knew it. The second week, I set the cruise control to 65 but still got pulled over because I was apparently falling asleep and drifting between lanes. The cop remembered my license plate the second time and let me off with a look of pity and directions to the nearest 24-hour place with coffee.
Not on a freeway, as I’m not American… but the fastest speed I’ve been ticketed for is 210 Kph, caught I lucky break there… it would’ve been worse a few miles sooner.
I don’t know how I never got a ticket when I lived in So Cal. I sped all the fucking time, everywhere. I tried not to drive in the far left lane because I didn’t want to drive 85-90 (and speeds easily get that high when traffic isn’t at a stand still), and I never passed the CHP. I’d just get over and give them time to get ahead of me. Since leaving So Cal, I haven’t been quite so lucky.
My first speeding ticket was for going 81 in 65 on the I-80 just before the first Elko exit. I didn’t even see the sign that said the speed dropped, so my bad. That ticket was like $260. I got another for going 45 in a 30 zone through town, but he wrote it up for 35 mph, for whatever reason. So that was only $90.
I-95 near Waterville, Maine. He clocked me doing 85 and wrote me up for 75 in a 65 zone. If he’d been set up a mile or two earlier he would have seen me doing 90.
In Maine “criminal speeding” is defined as 30 over the limit. I’ve done that a couple times before but never been caught. I don’t drive that fast any more, not since I learned it was a crime with a maximum sentence (however unlikely to be imposed) of 6 months in jail.
The only time I’ve ever gotten a speeding ticket on a freeway was in the last car I ever owned that did not have cruise control. It was right at sunset; in Texas, the speed limit drops from 70 to 65 at night and I was doing 75. I burned it off with a defensive driving course.
Since then, I just set the cruise control and let other people get the tickets. And I do occasionally get a chance to laugh my butt off when someone thinks that speed limit laws don’t apply to them and they go blasting past me, and 3 minutes later I cruise past them while they’re getting written up.
Many years ago, I was driving through the Arizona desert trying to get to Tucson from San Diego in a hurry. I was driving a Thunderbird with a speedometer that ended at some ridiculously low speed (like 75). I got nailed by a cop hiding behind a bridge piling in Dome, AZ. This was back when the speed limit was 55. He asked me how fast I though I was going, and I said “75?”. He said “Try 110, and I have to arrest anyone doing over 100 for reckless driving”. I almost vomited when I heard that as I have never been arrested. The cop, however was super cool and could see that indeed my speedometer only went to 75, so he wrote me up for 98. Surprisingly, the ticket was not for that much (around $200), and because Arizona at the time did not have reciprocity with California, if you paid the fine, you didn’t have to go to traffic school
The only freeway speeding ticket I’ve received was for doing 72 in at 55 on the western end of the Mass Pike. This was a long time ago, when 55 was the federal limit.