In the 11 years that I've been driving, I've never had a ticket.
Tonight, I got one. A very helpful <STRIKE>fascist</STRIKE>police officer pulled me over for the egregious crime of keeping pace with the rest of the traffic on the road. Apparently he had a quota to fill and I was unlucky enough to be the last one in line.
I won the $165 lotto.
I don't want to jinx things by saying, "at least this week can't get any worse." So I won't. But I do rather hope this is the end of it.
Incidentally, this comes about a week on the heels of an incident in which a cop detained and questioned me for the better part of an hour because I had the audacity to be in the general vicinity of hit and run accident. Apparently the fact that I wasn't carrying ID while on foot was "suspicious" (he was quite sarcastic and angry when I told him that the only thing that I had on me were my house keys. Apparently all citizens are expected to present their papers in order to travel. I didn't realize I lived in North Korea.) Most hilariously, he let his other "suspects" go because they were clearly uninjured whereas the car was totaled. Not only was I uninjured, but he made me walk back to the scene on foot, which I clearly had no trouble with.
I saw the actual driver fleeing the scene, but the cop had absolutely no interest in hearing that.
I'm not some "fight the power" teeniebopper pothead. I've always been respectful to cops. But over the past five years, this area seems to have become infested with cops that act like ****s simply for the sake of acting like ****s.
It's rather difficult for me to have any respect for the profession in light of that.
Unfortunately, your situation was a catch 22. You can obey the law and create a hazard, or speed just enough to keep up with traffic and not be one. Problem is, regardless of what "everyone else" is doing, it's still illegal, technically. One could view a typical highway scene as one would view a riot: lots of people breaking the law, only a few getting prosecuted. The problem is when the law impedes safety. I've heard of cops pulling behind someone in a faster lane on a multi lane highway and using their megaphone to tell the person to either speed up or get in the right lane. Obviously, the cop in that scenario was more interested in safety than tickets.
Do you live in a small town? Their cops are notorious for being hard liners. Anything for the ticket quota/meal ticket. Sometimes it helps to see their point of view.
As for your traffic crash luck of the draw, I've had multiple friends (including my father) who've simply run into a cop when the guy's having a bad day and they've decided to make my friends' day bad, too. Misery loves company, and there are so many laws out there that it's way too easy to break one without knowing it, not that that's any excuse (which it isn't). If they want to find something wrong, they will, it's as simple as that.
Law Enforcement of any type are pretty much the same. As the enforcers, they get to decide what they will and won't enforce, books be damned.
I would suspect that most tickets today are fallout from the National Speed Limit days or that the need of local government for ever more revenue is the real culprit. As I recall, GTA, you're over there on the upper Right Coast, so I would come down on the revenue issue as the prime cause, since you folks never had realistic state speed regulations.
I got a ticket myself earlier this month; I was in a rental car instead of my 12 year old pickup, heading back from the job to attend my Mom's funeral 300 miles to the south of where I was working. I was on Route 166 between Santa Maria and New Cuyama, a two lane road connecting I-101 and I-5.
It was mid day on a Friday, clear and dry, and while the posted limit was 55, normal traffic travels around the high 60s-low 70s except for the big trucks and RVs. I'd just cleared a gaggle of cars caught behind an enormous RV apparently powered by an old VW microbus engine, and was trying to make up a little time in a vehicle vastly more responsive and capable than the one I normally drive. I wasn't looking at the speedometer, I was driving the road.
I topped a hill and the CHP cruiser was in the oncoming lane. I'd taken my foot off the gas as I reached the crest, but an automatic doesn't have the instant slow down that my truck's stick shift provides. His lights came on immediately; apparently his radar was on full time, and he got me dead to rights.
Aaarghh. He had me at 78mph, and I wouldn't have guessed that I was doing over 70. Prior to 1973, that road's speed limit was no less than 65 in that section, and up until about 15-20 years ago (I got my license in 1969, so this seems like a brief period to me), the CHP was not allowed to use radar, and most officers would have winked and consoled himself that just seeing him would cool my jets down to an acceptable speed.
Instead, he was outraged that I would have the nerve to flout this arbitrary law, and wrote me my first speeding ticket in 18 years. At the wake next day, my brother in law informed me that he got caught speeding in that county on his motorcycle a few years back and they 'stuck it' to him; he warned me that I was looking at a fine in the $1000 realm.
Since I was given an order to appear at 8AM on a Tuesday in a county courthouse 350 miles from my place of residence, it would appear that the whole design is to make me pay through the nose; I will need to either drive all night or drive the day before and get a hotel room in the county to be there on time, losing at least two days of work, and spending more money in the county on top of what I pay for the ticket.
It used to be that (in the western states at least) the speed limits were suggested primarily on the basis of safety & average traffic conditions; an officer's judgement of the conditions of the road and your vehicle, and whether you were impaired in any way would determine that you were driving recklessly and unsafely, and you could still occasionally talk your way out of a ticket or fine.
Talking to Arizona and California Highway Patrol officers in the early 70s, I got the strong impression (they couldn't come right out and say so) that they had a healthy contempt for the concept of the feds deciding how fast was 'safe' to drive across the desert or the long distances normal for city to city travel west of the Mississippi. I know that I could travel from my duty station in San Diego and my family's home in Phoenix (a 400+ mile trip) in just under 5-1/2 hours with some regularity in the late 1970s, as long as I kept my speed under 65 near El Centro, Yuma and Phoenix' outskirts. The only time an officer lit his lights at me was the time I got a flat tire outside of Gila Bend, when he stopped to see if I needed any assistance (and he was offered a cold soda from my ice chest for his trouble).
Those days are gone forever; speed limits are now a means to control and in cases of failure to submit to control, to obtain income. CalTrans now sees its mission as preventing & restricting traffic movement so that they can spend your money building a fantasy light rail system (that no one will use, because it will take too long to get anywhere useful).
As agents of the revenue grubbing state and local governments, cops are now definitely your enemy on the road, and you can guarantee that the fees and fines you pay as a result of their efforts will NOT go to better and safer roads.
Thanks for the opportunity to rant.
cheers
horseback
When I looked at the California Driver's Handbook or whatever a few years ago, one of the cardinal rules it listed was "drive as fast as it is safe to drive." WTF is that even supposed to mean? Very ambiguous but I think it's a vestige of California being a lawless frontier state...CA is pretty "civilized" these days but you see these types of things here and there in the laws and in other aspects of California life.
What it means is that if you are the guy going 55 in the number 2 lane (Number 1 lane being the fast, or passing lane) in a 5 lane 65mph zone and the rest of the traffic is going 70, YOU are the traffic hazard. It's common sense advice, without coming right out and saying that you can break the speed laws under the right circumstances.Originally posted by Ba5tard5word:
When I looked at the California Driver's Handbook or whatever a few years ago, one of the cardinal rules it listed was "drive as fast as it is safe to drive." WTF is that even supposed to mean? Very ambiguous but I think it's a vestige of California being a lawless frontier state...CA is pretty "civilized" these days but you see these types of things here and there in the laws and in other aspects of California life.
However, I haven't heard of that particular rule being enforced since 1985 (my Chinese ex-sister in law got the ticket), but it is a valid one IMHO.
cheers
horseback