Not ONE HUMAN BEING in this city ever drives the speed limit. EVER!!! Not ONE car. Every day, I try to not go over the speed limit. All I get in return is honking, fingers, angry glares, swearing and yelling out the window… And I haven’t had ONE speeding ticket… NOT ONE… in twenty years. Yet somehow I managed to get one today, and my sister got one a year ago. Remember, I haven’t had one in twenty years, and neither has she. And everyone else we know gets speeding tickets in Tigard, and ONLY in Tigard, regardless of how long it’s been since they had one or if they ever had one, never mind the fact that every single car on the road in Portland is going at the same speed or faster.
As we all know, most American cities are having trouble balancing their budgets. Three California cities in one month declared bankruptcy last summer. Now let’s look at the 2012 Tigard budget. They seem to be doing very well.
What does “primarily” mean? We don’t know, because this vague claim is never clarified at any point in the report, which is SUPPOSED to be information available to the public. We do not know how much of this revenue is being made up by giving out more traffic tickets than any other American city I have ever seen. THAT was clearly San Bernadino’s problem-- they didn’t give out enough tickets!!
They claim it’s for “safety” and not revenue because nobody could possibly be against safety, but everybody is against random (or not-so-random) taxation, which is what traffic enforcement is.
Wait, this is the Internet. This thread will go on for days with everybody being on the opposite side of what would be expected. I’m a law-and-order sort, and I despise traffic enforcement. There are people who constantly harp on police and their bad behaviors (or what they see as brutality) who will be in here white-knighting the hell out of the revenooers.
And, of course, there will be the endless parade of liars who claim that they never, ever speed and that they as perfect law-abiding citizens have the right to do whatever they want to on the road, up to and including blocking the left lane because you’re a scofflaw and slowing you down is perfectly legitimate, while everywhere else on the Internet they decry vigilante justice.
The point is that you just opened up a very big can of worms here. At least you did it in the right place.
Speed limit drivers - I swear. Why can’t they just blithely ignore those signs like all the rest of us? Why do they have to be special snowflakes (sorry, I just had to) and go the speed limit when no one else is??
I had a curious thought. If a city ever came out and said, ‘screw safety, we only send cops out to ticket people when we want revenue’, would they be setting themselves up to be sued by the next speeder to crash?
It hasn’t been mentioned, but the speed limits, themselves, are supposed to be calculated from safety factors.
I do too. The large roads in Massachusetts run about about 10 mph over the speed limit in the slow lane and I am usually in the fast lane. I thought I was invincible for the longest times. I got stopped about 30 times over the years (maybe twice a year) and they always let me off with a verbal warning. I got a written warning last year and that was a disgrace to me at least at the time.
Then, on Christmas Day about a month ago, I was driving through Concord, New Hampshire and got stopped. I assumed I would get out of that one as well like I always did but no. The trooper did downgrade it to 79 in a 65 zone which was nice enough but I expected better for a Christmas present.
I am contesting it though. I was obviously guilty as hell and it was snowing hard but I want to play lawyer once. From everything I read, that basically consists of delaying the hearing date for a long as humanly possible and playing bureaucratic games so that nobody remember anything about it anymore or the officer retires. Wish me luck (or not).
Back when I lived in North Minneapolis and had to drive through Robbinsdale, I got perhaps 2 tickets a year on 36th. Two lanes in each direction, between two state highways, 30mph zone, traffic always going 40. Makes no goddamned sense why that road is 30 except that they make a shit load of money off the tickets.
The city of Burnsville (MN) is terrible as well, but they play a slightly different game with it. Lots and lots of trunk roads that vary up and down as you go along. 45 then suddenly 35, then up to 45, then down to 40. Tree lined roads so lots of signs are obscured until you’re right on top of them in the summer.
Because people have problems with a city trying to get money. People freak out over a one cent increase in taxes, of course they’ll freak out over a fine of a hundred dollars.
I don’t see a problem with the city using tickets to get revenue. Cities need revenue, and if catching crooks is one way to do it, then so be it.
I was keeping track of someone as they went through the court system once (he had stolen some stuff from my store). At one point he claimed he didn’t speak English and requested an interpreter. That pushed the court date back about 6 more weeks. Do you speak another language fluently. You might pretend you don’t know English at some point. Worked for him (at some point, I’d heard him speak English).
I’m surprised they don’t have interpreters in the courthouse ready to go. At least for Spanish in a city with such a large Mexican population. I’m guessing what he did is A)pretty common and B)not a trick he came up with on his own.
Our county (Gwinnett County) managed to get itself barred from using laser/radar speed guns for over a year. The newspaper did an analysis of traffic accidents during that period and found… no increase while the county could not give out tickets (local sheriffs could, though, so it was not a total speeders’ paradise).
Go to the annual hot air balloon festival in Tigard and clock the million dollars worth of confiscated D.A.R.E. cars–that tells you everything you need to know about their revenue enhancement programs.
Your best bet is just to delay it a couple of times until the cop doesn’t appear in court. Though I don’t know what are legitimate reasons for requesting a delay.
It’s simple, people. Leave five or ten minutes earlier and don’t drive like a bat outta hell. I wonder if all the leadfoots have any clue at all about how much smoother and faster overall traffic would flow if everyone stuck to the speed limit. But of course, they don’t. They think they are special and the speed limit doesn’t apply to them.
It’s not so simple. Most of the time I speed so I’m not a dangerous obstacle to all the other speeders. Sure, if nobody sped, or even most people didn’t speed, I would be among the non-speeders. But that’s not the case, certainly not on highways.
And I have a clue how much smoother and faster traffic flows if everyone breaks the speed limit by 5 or 10 miles an hours. The interstates were designed for higher speed than the posted limits in most places, which were reduced during the energy crisis, so you can’t even make a serious argument that ‘moderate’ speeding is dangerous. It is more dangerous to be going significantly slower than the prevailing speed.
…and here we have our first customer, the man who tells it like he wishes it to be rather than the man who accepts things as they are.
People are NOT going to leave early, and I have no particular interest in being the rolling roadblock just so that I can be cornholed by another driver and my family can put “He was right” on my tombstone. But maybe that’s just me.
This is close to where I live. They still are there, but no where near as bad as New Hope trolling Boone. Every day there is at least one car pulled over between Medicine Lake and 42nd.
