964spd

This morning on my way to office, I try to pass a truck before the freeway exit. After freeway, I stoped at first traffic light and here he came, a police motocycle. I was thinking, one more ticket to my collection. But wait, when I told him that I was doing 110-120 mph to pass the truck for my exit, He said he understood but be careful next time .(good thing I drove my 964 today, not my mighty vette or my bad-imaged eclipse).
Police in Bay Area rules(I met good police from Richmond, Berkeley to San Jose in last five years compare to some jerk officer around hwy 5),
Just reminds owners in Bay Aera, don't go hwy 5 to LA without radar. When I went to pay my tickets last month, I saw a poor guy get his first ticket for doing 76 mph on hwy 5(the speed limit is 70 mph there!!) <img src="graemlins/cussing.gif" border="0" alt="[grrrrrrr]" /> Just my personal thought. <img src="graemlins/jumper.gif" border="0" alt="[jumper]" />

horst

Around here we have "ticket fixers"- lawyers who cop a plea for you, and you end up with a violation which does not end up with you paying your insurance company for 3 + years. I find it cheapear to hire these guys in the long run... <img src="graemlins/a_smil17.gif" border="0" alt="[blabla]" />

jonfkaminsky

Horst-
Just out of curiousity...how does your insurance company NOT find out about it? I think mine periodically checks records and then applies its findings to the bill both in a negative fashion and positive fashion (three years since violation).

Its an interesting collaboration between private industry and the state to say the least. Try getting that information from the state yourself, or try to lookup who owns a license plate. How that stuff is happily passed on to an insurance company by the state is a privacy violation in my book.

964spd

[quote]Originally posted by horst-90C4:
<strong>Around here we have "ticket fixers"- lawyers who cop a plea for you, and you end up with a violation which does not end up with you paying your insurance company for 3 + years. I find it cheapear to hire these guys in the long run... <img src="graemlins/a_smil17.gif" border="0" alt="[blabla]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>

That's a good idea!! Just wonder can "ticker fixer" get all the ticket to not gulity or just some case.
<img src="graemlins/wave.gif" border="0" alt="[byebye]" />

Jeff Curtis

A "ticket fixer" coupled with a goofy speedometer readout usually gets your "moving" violation bumped down to a "non-moving" violation, like Faulty Equipment or Failure to Obey a Traffic Sign.

That's how it's done Jon, Insurance Companies generally aren't concerned with "non-moving" violations.

It's very common practice around here and saved my butt about five years ago.

jonfkaminsky

Interesting concept. I wouldn't rely on it around here, though. It's pretty tight (at least on speeders). I'll relate a little incident for the one ticket I have on the books at the moment. I ran into the local speed trap (country lane entering city limits where the limit becomes 25Mph, while taking some kids home from our church youth group. A patrol car was parked in a side street with radar who wrote the ticket for 11 over the limit. The weird thing was that we were not in line of site and he even wrote the ticket for a location on the road where he could not possibly see me. I opted to go to court with two lines of argument- one, the line of sight issue, the other from my dad (a career police officer) was the inaccuracy of radar. Now the town has a roadside mobile radar display sign setup to show your speed that is often times located at various points around town. I found it several days later and took several controlled passes at several prescribed rates of speed. My speed was registered by the unit +/- as much as 6mph, with only one pass out of five on the money. I thought I had a good argument to at least knock it down to the charge of "1-10 mph over the limit" instead of the "11-20 mph over" I was being accused of.

I went to court and was informed by the judge that this was a civil offense and that there would be no prosecuting attorney nor did the officer have to show up. The judge asked me if I objected to him reading the officer's report into the record. "Sure," I said (first mistake). The judge then asked if I had anything to say. I started into my spiel about the line of site, supported by a map, and my radar inaccuracy argument. The judge interrupted me, and informed me that "Mr. Kaminsky, this isn't a debate. Now if there is nothing further, I will speak and you will listen." The gavel fell and my wallet was $100 lighter, not to mention the insurance hit. The moral of the story- an attorney friend told me later that all I had to do was object to the judge acting as prosecutor by reading the officer's testimony into the record. By allowing him to do so, I was essentially agreeing to whatever the officer said.

Now I've got out of a few myself, so I shouldn't complain that much. The whole thing is such a racket anyway. My dad once told me that infraction rates are carefully scrutinized to maximize the income to the collecting government agency. They actually want you to speed and budget "x" amount of income into the government coffers from speeders. Set the penalty too high, and no one will speed as the risk far outweighs the benefit. Set the cost too low, and everyone speeds and they can't write enough tickets to make any money. Find the sweet spot and you can tempt enough people to speed and make some serious dough at the same time.

Christer

Jon

Here in the UK, the speed cameras serve the same purpose - to generate money. On a road north of London there are apparently 4 cameras on a 6 mile stretch of road! If you speed down that road you would lose your licence in 6 miles and pay at least £240 (4 x £60) in fines.....

Don't know which road it is though - saw it on TV (Quentin Wilson) a few weeks back.

Scary stuff.

Apparently in Sweden they started to put up speed cameras some time ago. The police decided to stop the project as the cameras were being systematically shot at by rifle-owning drivers! It just cost too much...!

Christer

Richard 92 C2

The A14 Between Bar Hill and Huntingdon in Cambs UK has three Truvello's (Cannot be picked up by radar scanners, but can by GPS systems) within a ten mile stretch of motorway, I have even seen a car with the standard roof mounted anti theft device taking pictures of passing motorists (must be a Porsche spotter) within this same stretch of road, you could easliy loose your licence just going to the next village.