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Using Google Maps to Get Out of a Traffic Ticket
Michael Nguyen writes "Edwin uses Google Maps to prove to the judge his traffic ticket was wrongly issued, saving himself some cash and points on his license. During his testimony, Edwin whips out a notebook, loads up Google Maps and upstages the offending officer with some quick Google Map searches." I wonder if anyone's gotten out of a ticket by showing how inaccurate most speed-check methods can be.
A lawyer friend of mine who specializes in getting people off of speeding tickets does it all the time
The small stakes and mechanical nature of the process of traffic court work in your favor if you choose to be one of the fraction that actually bothers to show up and contest the charges. Everything is weighted in favor of the officer, obviously, but they have an incentive system similar to AOL's technical support -- if the matter can't be disposed of within 6 minutes get off the line, its a loss. So if you present anything which bears even a cursory resemblance to an adequate defense the judge is likely to say "OK, whatever, be careful in the future. NEXT." Or you can pay a lawyer for the privilege and he'll do the exact same thing, except you'll be out more money than the fine was worth (incentives work both ways).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
You're forgetting the day's wages I lost going through the absurd motions of having to 'prove my innocence'.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This should be a lesson to everybody. Never admit fault to anything, even if you're in the right. Only answer direct questions about yourself and provide as much information as possible about the other person. It seem like a slimy thing to do, but the system is slimy and you'll get screwed unless you play by their (slimy) rules.
From your original post:
It seems like you forgot what you originally posted.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
sadly not the case, I have contested (rightfully) two bogus speeding tickets, and lost because a lot of the methods told to people that courts let you off on (cop not showing, radar maintinence) dont mean squat to a judge. your pretty much guilty as soon as you walk in the door of wasting his time.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Or you can pay a lawyer for the privilege and he'll do the exact same thing, except you'll be out more money than the fine was worth (incentives work both ways).
Except that the fine is only a small part of the cost of a speeding ticket. The real cost can be thousands of dollars due to increased insurance premiums over the next 5-7 years. If your insurance only goes up by $50/quarter that is still $1,000 over the next 5 years. For a lot of people - young, male, single - it would not be unheard of to see your insurance rates increase by $100-$200/quarter. Auto insurance is legalized robbery.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You can choose to contest it as a misdemeanor, and get all the requisite priveleges that go along with it
Rights. Not privileges, rights. It is my right as a citizen of a free country to be considered innocent until proven guilty, to be given a fair and speedy trial, and to not speak until I can talk to my attorney. I am indeed privileged to have these basic human rights (which, sadly, do not exist in some third world lands), but that does not change the fact that they are rights and not privileges. Some may think that I'm being too anal regarding the two words, but I disagree. I think that the moment we begin to think our basic rights "privileges," people's "privileges" will be taken away for this or that. That is not a road I wish to go down.
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
The correct answer would be: "I believe I was doing the speed limit officer, is there a problem?"
look, you can talk about loopholes.
you can talk about high priced lawyers.
but the american system of justice, when it works the right way, is that all people are innocent until proven guilty.
it comes down to one question. would you rather let a guilty person go free, or lock up an innocent person. in the usa, we have a system where we don't want to lock up the innocent.
look at what happened in illinois a couple years back. when the state did some dna testing on inmates, they found out they had over 100 people on death row who were innocent. these people got conivected because they had bad lawyers, the police needed to arrest someone, so they picked up a crack head or someone unemployed.
people should be free. we don't want the patriot act. we don't want people being arrested and held without being charged. we don't want the police going through reading lists, casting fishing nets, and without having any reason, looking for anyone to arrest. it is like a cop who decides to go by the local highschool, see who graduated in the bottom 10%, figuring the dumb ones are the troublemakers, and then following them around until he finds one of them in the woods smoking a joint.
then again, with cities like boston and chicago putting up 3000 cameras that can look inside of cars, that is the direction we are going.
i feel sorry for the people without any money. if they ever get charged with anything, they are fucked. look at the husband of the wife who dissapeared. the police started interviewing him, there were reports he was the #1 suspect. then one day, his wife shows up in las vegas. she got cold feet. if the police wanted to, they could have strung up that man and ruined him. there was a story about a man who worked for the usa, at a wepons lab, around the time the anthrax was mailed to the senate. he was the #1 suspect. the fbi tore apart his house, they tore open his mattress, they put holes in his walls, all looking for evidence. the fbi then went to his girlfriends house, and did the same thing. they could not find nothing, but they still call him the #1 suspect. he is free, but always followed. and the police keep threatening him, of more searches, of harrasing his friends.
i'll give one last example. look at monica lewinsky. people should read about what the fbi did to her. they grabbed her off the streat, forced her into a hotel room, and told her if she did not describe her relationship with the president (the blowjobs), they would arrest her and she would never be free again. one fbi agent told her, i think i should call your dad, to let him know what you did. talk to us or i'll call. and for the first 6 hours, when she asked for a lawyer, they would not give her one, and instead threatened to call her parents, friends, and to let the media know what she did. they put her through hell, and never charged her with anything.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
driving is a privilege not a right. there are certain things we trade to live in a free society, such as unlimited freedoms "I'll wherever, whenever, however" with basic safety. a traffic ticket is not a crime, it is a code violation, that's all. if you get X number of them, you can have your privilege revoked. rights are entirely different. let's take an altogether separate yet related example. (and one I know quite well, as it happened to a friend many years ago.) You own a dry cleaning business, you follow all the rules, laws, etc. A female employee gets pregnant. She can't work around the toxic cleaning solutions. Fine. OSHA comes in and orders the business closed until changes are made, fines them, and orders them to pay temporary lost wages. No crime was committed, they weren't hauled off to jail, nothing. Most environmental regs are such. So too workers' regs. Are we willing to eschew all those? Perhaps. perhaps not.
We(society) accept traffic cops and their patrolling of the streets to keep us safe. (This is not the same as "law enforcement though.) We must follow traffic laws or else we'll be unable to drive anywhere.
As for rights, I feel the major problem we have is that everyone feels everythign is a right. And no, aboriton, marriage, and welfare are not rights. That just highlights the problem. We have grown accustomed to thinking everything is a right. Rights are an entirely different idea. Being able to "just do something" is hardly a right. I just can't drive, I don't own the road, I don't own the traffic lights, and I don't follow the rules, I can endanger others.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Traffic tickets are about revenue, not public safety. Make them burn up the profit on your ticket in court time. If everybody fought their ticket, traffic tickets would become unprofitable.
I don't know where you live, but in Los Angeles I can't believe that they issue a single inappropriate traffic ticket in any given year. I'd guess better than 80% of people are speeding, with maybe 20% at speeds that are truely unsafe. I'd also guess that 80% of people follow too closely for emergency situations. Maybe 50% actually use their turn signals on a regular basis. I see people running red lights on a daily basis. If there is merging going on, then there will be people doing their best to merge out of turn. I see people in large, top-heavy vehicles weaving through traffic at high speeds. The list goes on and on.
Now, you say that these are all meaningless technicalities, and they shouldn't be against the law in the first place. I disagree completely. The speed limit is the best case for you, where most of the time most people can exceed the speed limit without significant risk. However, to take away the speed limit is to invite people to drive dangerously fast, like some already do. It creates a larger speed differential between the fast and the slow. It also disregards that in some areas, and many conditions, you really do have to drive slower than you think you do to be safe. If you agree that there should be A speed limit, then you have to accept some arbitrary limit, and a lot of people are going to consider it too low (whether it is for them or not.) A variable speed limit would be impossible to enforce, and therefore just as bad as no limit.
We have traffic accidents all the time. They killed more people than terrorism in September 2001. Traffic costs the economy billions of dollars. It drives up oil consumption, and increases stress levels. Yet while I can watch hundreds of cars a day doing stupid things that are likely to cause accidents or slow down traffic, I almost never see anyone getting ticketed for it. That's the reason it happens, because there are no perceived consequences.
So when somebody gets a ticket, I don't doubt it was deserved. As the saying goes, "Beat your son regularly. Even if you don't know why, he will." Anything to get people to realize that what they do while driving has real consequences is fine by me. If they just went door to door with speeding tickets, they would be right far more often than wrong.
A good friend of my mother had her son die in a car accident. My first thought was, "he probably deserved it." It's disturbing, but true.
Even citizens accused of civil citations (code violations, as you put it) deserve proper protection under the law.
Further, many traffic tickets are actaully crimes. In many states, speeding 20 MPH over the posted speed limit can be deemed reckless driving by the arresting officer...this is typically a misdemeanor. However, the evidence is still accepted as prima facie, and the driver is still preumed guilty until proven innocent. Sadly, this is widely abused across the country by many municipalities in order to enhance local revenue.
I sure don't accept many of their practices, including speed traps, DUI roadblocks, and red light cameras...particularly the latter, where the accused is not even given a chance to face their accusor.
FWIW, I agree that we live in a society where we seem to have a sense of entitlement. It's a bummer. However, I still think that much of our speed enforcement as well as the 'justice' system surrounding it is a freaking joke. Criminal justice of any kind should not be treated in the cavalier manner that it is in the traffic system.
-Turkey
In many ways US is much worse than a third-world country.
So don't go preaching with one finger when three fingers are pointing at yourself.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I don't understand this. If I decide to add a deck to the back of my house, how am I directly affecting the public. If I can have a cup of coffee on my deck instead of in my kitchen, did I just change how my nieghbors live?
Just because you are the only one allowed to use your property doesn't mean you can do with your property whatever you want.
This is true, and for good reason. We don't want people installing their own septic tanks if the water level is too high, and getting everyone sick. We don't want people buying a house in the middle of a senic residential subdivision and opening up a buisness and increasing traffic flow. But all this can be handled with zoning laws. It does not require publicizing what land and improvements everyone builds.
This is why both survey information as well as past tax assessments of your property are kept in your county court house, available for inspection to all comers for free.
I am all for taxes. I think we need taxes to level the playing field, to raise money to provide oppertunity to the poor, to pay for roads and schools.
But the correct tax is income tax. Not property tax. Property tax is inherently evil because property tax means nobody really owns land.
If I work for 10 years, and save up enough money to buy an acre of land, and a house, and then decide I want to semi-retire, I should be able to do so. But if my acre of land and house has a $4,500 tax, that means I have to find a job just to pay for the right to own property. That is evil.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
You are a tool.
"People are so subjective. Technology is never wrong."
Ever hear the phrase "good enough for government work"? Who do you think calibrates these cameras?
driving is a privilege not a right.
BS. Driving is not a privelage, it's a requirement. Maybe if you live somewhere with public transportation or mass transit, it's a privelage. Some of us actually don't live in an urban sprawl, and it's not exactly legal to ride a bike on an interstate. Our whole country has been developed with the idea of everyone driving everywhere. By revoking or suspending someone's license, you might as well be saying you want them to drive around without insurance, because that's what's going to happen.
Aside from that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
that still doesn't make it a right. all the necessity in the world and it is still a privilege. what are you going to say to a judge when you've gotten your fourth speedin gticket in 6 months. "your honor, I need a car". he's going to laugh. sorry to be an ass, but you don't have to live in the sticks. it's not a requirement. and go back to my last point. for too many people, everything is a right. thinnk about it, if your lifestyle choices can negate law, or can determine the legal status of things, then we're on a pretty slippery slope.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
"it's a requirement."
No, it is your CHOICE to live farther than walking distance from work/shops/entertainment. Living farther than that means that you have brought that requirement on yourself. It is not an inherent requirement. Driving is absolutely a privelage, and if someone wants to mess that up for themselves, then they have only themselves to blame.
Or, you can get an insurance company that keeps lousy records. I have Allstate, and whenever I talk to my agent I always ask her what tickets they have records of in their system. In my life, I've only received 4 tickets (after 22 years of driving). 3 speeding, 1 for rear-ending someone on a wet road. Allstate managed to find out about only ONE of my speeding tickets, and they responded by lowering my premium by $40 a year for being a good driver.
The really funny thing is that Allstate never seemed to figure out that I got a ticket for rear-ending someone at a stoplight, even though they fixed my car for me ($3500, THANKS ALLSTATE!). And when I told my agent that they didn't have the ticket for the accident in their system, she told me that if nobody else was going to put it in there, she wasn't going to do it.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Actually that would be a simple fallacy ... Division
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
It's a little more complicated than that. It's your responsibility to keep a safe distance because sometimes the car in front of you HAS to slam on the brakes. If you can't stop when the car in front of you slams on the brakes, you are NOT at a safe distance. Let's face it -- even if you're tailgating, you can handle slowing down. The whole point of the "safe distance" is so you don't cause a crash when things go wrong.
Obvious example -- if I see a kid run out into the road in front of me, do you think I'm going to brake gently so the guy behind me has time to react? Less obvious example -- suppose I see a ball roll out from between two parked cars (and think a kid is probably following). Even less obvious -- suppose it's just an empty paper bag, but I just reacted and slammed on the brakes. Suppose the puddle on the manhole cover looked exactly like a *missing* manhole cover. So many things can go wrong -- are you saying I shouldn't play it safe?
I don't know in this case what the woman said about why she stopped... but I still tend to feel like she would have been less at fault. Maybe she was distracted because she missed a turn, whatever -- but in her negligence she didn't hit anything she wasn't supposed to. In his, he did. There are so many situations that happen all the time where people DO have to suddenly slam on the brakes. And the option of keeping a safe distance from the car *behind* you simply isn't possible (wow, if that excuse worked..!)
Reminds me of a funny story, actually -- different situation, but related. A friend of mine was driving an massive old junker when he was in high school, going 10 over the speed limit already on a narrow, no-passing road, and a guy in a BMW was just riding his bumper, tailgating like crazy. He couldn't go any faster without risking a ticket, so he just kept driving, but the guy was glued to his bumper. Finally he was angry enough that he just slammed on his brakes, and of course it was an instant rear-end, the front of the BMW was crushed, and the driver leaped out of his car shouting, etc.. The reply? "I thought I saw an animal." The BMW driver was totally at fault, and his car was toast (whereas my friend could drive away after the cops wrote it up... one bonus of those massive old American cars).
Obviously, this approach to tailgaters is not recommended (and the legal situation would be different if that little lie were admitted), but it's sure nice to think about when someone's practically in your trunk and endangering *your* life because he's late for some meeting. I've been tailgated by Hummers on the highway, which *really* raises the hair on the back of my neck. Yeah, like HE'LL be able to stop from crushing me when I have to brake because something falls off a truck (an experience I've had...).
Personally I'm not entirely convinced the government wouldn't be trying to turn a profit. If it were profitable, they could use the excess to fund other things or cut taxes. But that's neither here nor there...
;).
When it comes to free market economies, though, you're dead on. The status quo is often a good indicator of what is most efficient. The presence of government competition brings up the question of how free that market is, which brings up the question of how efficient the current solution is.
Is it a good idea? I don't know... ask a real economist. (Then ask a sociologist for a good laugh.... kidding, only kidding
And then I borrow your car and run a red light. Guess who's getting the ticket!
The owner of the car gets the ticket as they are ultimately responsible for whomever drives their car. Here (Ontario) if someone borrows your car and runs a red light, you get a ticket in the mail but you don't get any points off which means that the owner of the car involved is getting the ticket not the individual.
Personally I think red light cameras are a good idea. People seem to forget that yellow means stop if safe to do so. And usually if the lights have walk signals you know when they start flashing that the light is going to change soon so you can slow down (or speed up if you think you can make it).
No, it would be taken away all because they REPEATEDLY violated a well know law. It's not like you don't know the speed limit. It's that you CHOOSE to ignore it, and you know what will happen if you get caught. Let me write up an example:
Taking away someone's license completely would usually mean the loss of their job, followed by the loss of their home, car, quite likely the loss of their spouse... All because they were driving while drunk for the 9th time and almost killed a family of four? I don't think that's a reasonable punishment.
Taking away someone's license completely would usually mean the loss of their job, followed by the loss of their home, car, quite likely the loss of their spouse... All because they were driving a little faster then the safe driving speeds on the road, and accidentally hit a guy backing out of his hidden driveway killing him on impact? I don't think that's a reasonable punishment.
Taking away someone's license completely would usually mean the loss of their job, followed by the loss of their home, car, quite likely the loss of their spouse... All because they were driving a little too fast and couldn't stop when that toddler ran out in the middle of the road in front of his house? I don't think that's a reasonable punishment.
You broke the law, not once, not twice, but at least half a dozen times to get a punishment of suspended license. You deserve to loose your driving privileges. This is what is wrong with America. People don't expect consciences. It's not like you didn't know what would happen, but you choose to bring it on yourself, so yes, you do deserve to be homeless and jobless.
I don't know about the US legal system, but here in the UK there's usually a scale of possible penalties for common traffic offences. Minor offences like routine speeding usually result in "fixed penalty notices" -- such and such costs you x amount of money and gets you y points, and if you pay up, it never goes to court.
Now, you don't have to accept the fixed penalty, and can challenge the case in court if you wish. However, if you do so, the magistrates have access to the full range of penalties, and a lot of discretion about how to apply them. If there are genuinely mitigating circumstances, and you can offer a reasonable explanation for your actions, then magistrates can often reduce or eliminate a penalty they see to be unfair. (For example, "I was on the way to hospital with a casualty in critical condition in my vehicle, there was no time to wait for an ambulance, and exceeding the speed limit resulted in saving his life without causing unusual danger to others, your honour" with supporting evidence from hospital and ambulance staff would probably go a long way.) However, if they feel that you're taking the piss, they will tend to hand down penalties at the upper end of the scale. That means more fines, more points, accelerated or possibly immediate disqualification, and potentially even jail time, depending on the offence.
It takes something like 4 routine speeding tickets in 3 years to get you a semi-automatic ban in this country; you'd have to demonstrate exceptional hardship of some sort to avoid it at that stage. However, annoy the police and magistrates, and you'll probably find yourself banned after two offences, and imprisoned for driving without a licence the third time they see you. It would take hundreds of people trying to block up the system to really bring it down, but in the meantime, you're still going to jail. Is that a smart plan, really?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Red Light Cams have been shown to increase the incidence of accidents in intersections, because people will panic brake for fear of a ticket.
While I doubt this to be true... if it were, it's a problem with the morons following too close behind the first car that are causing the accidents. Not the person who is, and should be, stopping for the red light.
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I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
> Marriage isn't a right? The hell you say! The minute you try to tell me who I can and can't marry is the minute I tell you go play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself.
Oooh, I was agreeing with a lot of your post up until that line, then you lost me.
You cannot marry a member of your immediate family.
You cannot marry an inanimate object.
You cannot marry anyone if you are already married.
You cannot marry someone of insuficcient age.
You cannot marry someone in order to become naturalized.
You cannot marry an animal or plant.
And, no Virginia, in many states you cannot marry a member of your gender.
Sorry, but there are legal restrictions already on marriage, so you cannot say you have the "right" to marry whomever you want. Er, well, you can say that, and you can even piss and moan about it as you have done, but you'd be wrong.
And for what it's worth, there are no apostrophes in "whose" and "yours".
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Ohhh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I had the CHOICE of paying 3000$ a month for an apartment within walking distance of my 9$ an hour job.
Assuming you reside in the US or Canada your place of employment is YOUR CHOICE, just like where you live and what (or if) you drive. Everyone's choices are limited by some factor (quite often income as in your case) but everyone still has a number of choices. I'd say that the vast majority of people who complain they "have no choice" are just too lazy or lack the courage to make tough choices.
I don't think many people would be able to tolerate living by themselves on $9 per hour nowadays--if you can tolerate such a wage then you must be getting help with your expenses in some fashion (perhaps you still live with your parents or you split expenses with many roommates). If you are unhappy enough to complain about your situation you still have many choices though:
* You could purchase a transit pass--where I live, if you are low income or a senior it costs less per month than one tank of gas for your car, meaning that by dumping your car (and the 2-5 tanks of gas, insurance and maintenance costs that go along with it) you'll probably double your disposable income.
* If you cannot do transit because you work shift work/irregular hours or work in an area that lacks good transit service then you might want to consider moving closer to your employment. I guess that choice isn't very feasible since you say those places cost $3000/month. However, I find that in places that are not well served by transit that only offer low-wage employment such a situation is unusual--if your place of employment only offers low wage jobs and you cannot get transit there then usually it is a low-income neighbourhood and/or near industrial areas and apartments there are typically much less expensive than that.
* You could ask for a wage increase. You have good reason to--the expense of getting to your job and the fact that your present wage is pretty crappy unless you are a highshool summer worker.
* You could find another job. If you are only getting $9 then your employers then you rellay don't owe them much loyalty. Low income jobs are plentiful almost everywhere on the continent, especially since we are living in a pretty good economic situation. Better to work at a fast food restaurant next door for $6 than to spend the wage difference on a long commute to work. A lot of employers acutally DO care about there employees so in searching for another job you might find one of those. For most jobs it isn't easy to retain people at $9/hr so you could get more money. Also, here are several employers in my area that bus all their employees from a few public transit stops arond the city to their facilities outside the city at no extra cost to the employees--even the ones that make wages comparable to yours.
* You could upgrade your education in order to qualify for better work. Employers *who care* will help ther employees do this by partially or fully subsidising relevant tuition fees, and some even give leave-of-abseences for full-time education and guarantee employment when you finish.
There you go... several choices that do not always require you to own a car. They are often difficult choices but they are yours to make--you ave *the right* to choose among those choices. So don't belly-ache about driving being a RIGHT...it IS NOT a right despite your excuses. If you find high fuel and insurance costs, idiot traffic officers and "traffic violations as revenue generation" intolerable then maybe driving just isn't for you. If enough people ever got so dissatisfied with the annoyances and expense of owning cars that they actually got rid of them then you can bet that all the "important people" would sit up and take notice when the auto industry starts to implode, insurance companies lose premiums and businesses that depend on traffic start to close.
Sound too pie-in-the-sky? Not really. I made these comments based o