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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Can I use that argument to get out of speeding tickets? It's culturally normalized to go 10-20kph over the limit, and people actually get pissed if you do the limit on the highway.

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Where I live (Texas) the de facto norm really does appear to be that you're entitled to add 10 mph (~15 kph) to the posted speed limit, and that's roughly what the police enforce. People get really angry and start writing their politicians if police start frequently writing tickets for less than that, so they usually don't. Some police out in West Texas used to be notorious for setting up speed traps on the highways and enforcing the speed limit strictly (as a source of revenue), so the state legislature actually cracked down on them because people were so angry.

The UK has strict guidelines about where fixed speed cameras may be located and how they should be signposted for similar reasons.

I always thought that came from the error rate of old radar guns?

When you consider the real reason you are getting the ticket isn't that you were speeding, everyone else was as well, but that you are an easy money with an out of state plate or maybe the color of your skin wasn't appreciated by the officer. Now, real speeding tickets are given for people who are violating even the extended limits, but for the reality is that legal realism + over arching laws + selective enforcement means that the law actually is that being the wrong skin color or from the wrong location or displaying the wrong political bumper sticker is a ticketable offense as long as the officer doing so is being discrete enough.

I drive 9mph over speed limit and I have not been ticketed a single time in 9 years I am driving. Cultural norm is that speeding 10mph is OK so police ignores some speeding in most locations.

http://fightyourspeedingticket.com/fifty-miles-over-the-post...

Speeding often has surprisingly low fines. Get caught doing 115 in a 65 mph area in Florida. That's ~1,000$ for a first offence. Second time they revoke your license for a year and more than double the fine, next they revoke it for 10 years and charge you 5k.

But, first time around it's kind of meh, IMO. Of course you will probably also get reckless driving which is stiffer. http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...

Considering the high risk of killing someone you would think the could come up with a better deterrent.

My cousin when he was a teenager in Minnesota got a reckless/careless driving offense when he was speeding in his new Camero around the Mall going 80MPH. He lost his license for a year, had to pay a 2K fine, had to go to a defensive driving school course and then had some 50 hours of community service to do on top of it all. He's uncle has repeatedly said he would have been better off just getting a DUI. My uncle maintains the judge was the "hanging" judge type and my cousin's other two speeding tickets didn't help him much.

The funny thing is, he never got so much as a jay walking ticket after that, so the punishment definitely straightened him out.

A DUI would have likely been an additional $8000 in fines and an additional class(es) with MADD hammering home the potential effects of drunk driving.

I think it's a lot easier to play off speeding as a youthful indiscretion than drunk driving, as well.

Here in Ontario there are big signs on the highways that say if you're caught driving more than 50 kph (~30 mph) over the speed limit they take your license and your car (!) right there by the side of the road.

That's news to me! Admittedly, I haven't been on a highway in Ontario in ~2 years, but I definitely never saw signs like that then (of course, I definitely saw people exceeding the speed limit by 50kph on more than one occasion, and given how quickly my uncle made it to my grandparents' house in Ontario the last time he headed over from Montreal, I suspect he may have too ;).

- Canadian raised in the US, spent a fair amount of time in Canada

It's relatively recent, to crack down on ridiculous speeders and racers. Honestly those people deserve the book thrown at them.

Going 50km over is an instant roadside suspension and a $2,000 - $10,000 fine.

I've always wondered why production cars for road use can ever go over 100 mph. Put a governor at 65 mph and you never have to both enforcing speeding tickets again. I'm not advocating for this, but if it's so bad they will take away your ability to drive over it why not limit it mechanically?

Because fines provide revenue?

There are actually places in the US where the speed limit is 80 and 85. That's not 100, but it's quite a bit more than 65.

I was not aware. I make the same case with 85 as I did 65. Throw in a GPS and you could make the distinction.

Then in 10 years, someone, somewhere decides that 90 is acceptable on a specific road. Now all cars with limiters need to be modified. Want to be able to change it remotely? Now you add an attack vector. Throw in a GPS? Now you're asking for additional government monitoring that is mandatory and might be (will be) used for spying purposes.

You could design a GPS speed limiter that doesn't track location, TomTom's had an "overspeed" warning 10 years ago, it would go orange if you went over the speed limit and go red and make a bong noise if you went way over, My old boss used to drive fast so I saw that quite a lot (in the end I told him I wouldn't share a car with him if he didn't stick to the speed limit).

Nissan GT-R's have (at least in Japan, where it is as far as I know mandatory, not sure if they are removed in international sales) limiters that deactivate when they are on a white-listed race track.

Speed limit on the highway by my house is 70. If you are doing less than 75 during rush hour you will be passed by a stream of cars. I've been overtaken while doing close to 90.

They do that in Germany. Higher end cars come with a governor that caps the speed at 250 km/h. (That's around 155 mph, for the unenlightened.)

That's still below the legal speed limit on some German roads. But it's above the highest recommended speed of 130 km/h (~ 80 mph).

The governor is merely a gentlemen's agreement between the big car manufacturers, and any garage will take it out no questions asked.

You may actually need to go 100 MPH in traffic. Speed limits are 85 in places, and 15 over that may be required to maneuver.

Speed limits on interstate class roads seem pretty dangerous to me - you can watch people thinking "but I'll get a ticket" and backing off at bad times. Of course, I guess of there were no signs with numbers on them they'd drive 115 and kill themselves.

Large sport bikes have governors. Want to guess the limit? 186 mph.

My own experience is that carse indicate something like 10% more speed than the real one. You can check that with a GPS, which gives very precise speed measurements. So maybe 9mph excesive speed will not trigger any radar.

I believe the mantra in NC and probably many states is "9 you're fine, 10 you're mine"

Montana raised the speed limits from 75 to 80mph last summer. I've noticed an odd effect... the traffic is now predominantly moving between 75 to 80mph, not 75 to 85mph.

This isn't an odd effect at all, it's perfectly well understood. Google the "85th percentile rule" for more.

If most drivers are "automatically" adding 9-10 MPH to the speed limit, it means the speed limit is too low.

That would be an instance of fallacious reification[1]. Legal realism would say that the law is not enforced based on whether or not you obeyed the speed limit. The cop's whim, bias, and whatever organizational pressures bear down on them all contribute to your ticket. The statute itself is only a small part of the law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

I think I've even seen it in print (in some of those newspaper articles, like "Ask law enforcement questions"), but definitely from discussions with them, but Washington State Patrol's "stated" policy for speeding (at least on highways) is "Under 10 Over" and they won't target you.

Anybody who's been anywhere near the Seattle metro area knows what a bloodbath the speed traps are.

Targeted or not, they like to do insanely stupid things like park their cruisers on the shoulder of a bridge, inches from the lane of travel, lights off, at night, trying to "ambush" people.

Only on I-90. For some reason, nobody enforces speed limits on the toll bridge that tech workers take to Google/Microsoft...

Well, 520 used to not have any SPACE for cops. Occasionally they'd hide out at the little cutout for the bridge maintenance people. I'm not sure how this has changed, didn't they widen the bridge or something? Maybe there's more space for cops now.

The west side of the state is nothing compared to the east. The WSP on the east side of the cascades pull people over whenever they need some revenue, regardless of their speed. They are filthy thieves shaking down anybody that looks vulnerable. When I drive to Seattle, you can anticipate seeing the WSP approximately every 20 minutes the entire way across - until you hit the west side of the cascades, in which case you'll only see them occasionally up and down I-5. They are monsters and I'd be fine getting rid of them entirely. They are not making the roadways of Washington any safer and do not represent the values of the people of this state.

It's interesting you say that because I've had the exact opposite experiences.

I drive from Mercer Island to Spokane every weekend, and I commute from Puyallup to Mercer Island every day for work.

Going to work I'll see anywhere from two to five WSP, but usually traffic isn't moving fast enough for them to ticket. (Although, most mornings they have one or two people pulled over in the bend just in I-5, just a couple minutes north of the Tacoma Dome.)

Driving across the state I've only been pulled over once (near Ritzville). I won't say how fast I was going, but it was fast enough that right when I saw the headlights on her patrol car I immediately pulled over and waited for her to give me a ticket. (Which she did, and she knocked it down to something a bit more reasonable, money wise.)

Now when I drive across the state I just throw my cruise control on at ~83 MPH (the extra three because it helps me get ahead of those cars whose speed "drifts" from 75-85 and back again, which is very annoying). Usually I'll drive past two or three officers who just sit there and watch me fly by at thirteen over.

IMHO the worst are the county sheriffs near the Chelan area. Those guys will ticket you for 51 in a 50.

Unrelated: are you from Poulsbo?

I tend to agree. Granted, my first speeding ticket was coming back from the Gorge (rookie mistake, but at least I was not drunk and/or high!), but the cops are EVERYWHERE in the metro area. Last time I was there, I rented a car in downtown Seattle to go see the tulips, and saw 8 speedtraps, each with a cruiser clocking people with laser and multiple moto chase units, up and down I-5, in the 8 hours I had my rental car. I can go MONTHS in the SF Bay Area without seeing a single speed trap.

Eastern WA is just so much less populated.. maybe they stand out more, but they're not as common IMO. Granted, your speed will be higher when you DO get busted, and there are definite speed trap downs like Ritzville and Colfax, but I never found it to be anywhere near as bad as the metro areas.

And yeah, they can just fire all those assholes. They're absolutely terrible and do nothing to promote road safety -- it's the exact opposite.

If you're white, sure.

In many jurisdictions there is a tacit understanding between police and residents that 9mph over the freeway speed limit will not get you pulled over, 10mph+ is fair game.

You probably couldn't use that in court to get out of a ticket, but as a matter of enforcement a massive amount of speeding is routinely tolerated.

Effectively that's how the law is enforced anyway. I've never seen someone pulled over for doing <= 10 over the limit on a highway. On large highways you can typically get away with going <= 15 mph over.

I've gotten a hefty ticket for 7mph over. This was on a rural road with wide shoulders and broad turns. The spot where I was busted is a really long straightaway with absolutely no driveways or other sources of entering/exiting traffic. The road would be perfectly safe if the limit were 65mph rather than 55mph.

You probably won't "see it" until it happens to you. Highway patrol is managed for revenue generation rather than public safety.

If you're ever going through Southern Utah, between Vegas and SLC, don't do it... my last ticket was for 6mph over. Pretty pricey, for what it was at that.

If speeding tickets were intended to stop people from speeding rather than just to collect money from them, the answer would probably be yes.

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