Ampolitor said:
hmmm unreasonable, well Ive been a cop for 10 years now and Yes speed limits are needed. I just worked on a woman who died last week because somebody thought that he shouldnt follow the sped limit, he blew a tire crossed traffic and killed her.
The speed limit is not set for the driver, its set for the roadway due to materials, pitch, number of access points (driveways). The speed limit is set by the towns and cities for a reason. I love when people complain about tickets, theyre supposed to make you mad and THINK, to slow down so next time were not dragging you out of a car and slapping you on a gurney.
That's the theory. The practice is something else entirely - I've seen radically different speeds assigned to equivalent sections of the road as determined by local juristictions. Something I have noted is that traffic invariably goes 5 - 10 mph over whatever the posted limit is. And it's never enforced consistently enough to make the roads any safer - indeed it can make them worse.
In Tennessee the speed limit of road construction areas is almost universally 45 MPH. When I drove a truck I'd dutifully follow it - despite the complaining over the radio. I stopped the practice after digging up some newpaper articles of major accidents being caused by speeders rear-ending vehicles actually going the limit.
Note that in TN the speed limit can drop from 70 to the 45 construction zone speed with little to no warning.
What really gets my goat though are split speed limits. These are demonstrably dangerous, yet juristictions continue to pass them. In a moment of poetic justice, a Michigan Senator's daughter was killed by hitting a semi. She was going about 72 and hit the truck with, also obeying it's speed limit, was going 55. The major problem with split speed limits is it makes the car drivers believe they are entitled to pass the truck no matter how fast it goes.
California though is the most draconian in this regard. I read an article where a California officer ticketted a driver for impeding traffic by following the speed limit and failing to allow a car to merge onto the interstate. However, in California it is illegal to drive a semi in the left lane for any reason. The driver pointed this out to the officer, who snidely remarked that yes, if the driver had changed lanes he'd have been ticketted for that and if he sped up to let the car in he'd be ticketted for that. Fortunately when the ticket was fought in court and this was revealed to the judge (and admitted to by the officer) the officer was prompty fired from his job and the case dismissed.
I can only conclude that yes, speeding tickets are a money making scheme. I've seen way too many anti-speeding campaigns coincide with budgetary shortfalls to believe otherwise. My main reason for this belief though is the following: Speeding tickets are way too low to have any detterent effect. Speeding tickets are intentionally set at an affordable price so that people won't feel too compelled to pay too much attention to it.
If I see a juristiction set speeding tickets up into the thousands of dollars / offence then I'll believe it's a safety issue. Indeed, I feel the speeding ticket fine in a construction zone should be a flat $1000 / 10 mph over the limit, doubled for workers present, doubled for commercial vehicle.
