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Anti-Speed Camera Activist Buys Police Department's Web Domain
Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police Department site. The department let its domain expire and McCrary was quick to pick it up. From the article: "Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department's website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city's nose. Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras — like the one on US Highway 11E that caught him — and how people don't like them."
Y'know, this guy can make back his $90 and then some by putting ads on the site. The PD must have already setup links everywhere, all he has to do it set it up, sit back, and collect a check. What are the chances this guy will be sued?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Awesome! I tip my hat to this dude, nice one...
It's gonna be a real bummer for him when he gets stopped for speeding, he acts "suspicious", they search his car, and then they just happen to "find" some cocaine in the trunk.
Concerns about privacy are serious and stuff, but is this guy just seems like he's throwing a 4-year hissy fit about being scolded by his mommy.
The guy broke the law (probably) and was observed in a public space doing so. It's not like they put a camera in his residence.
My other sig is clever.
Domain hijacking isn't cute, particularly for something so petty as a parking ticket.
I wonder why the city had a .com to begin with - it would've been more appropriate to have a .us or .gov
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Most of those races see upwards of 60,000 fans, usually over 100,000. They dont need cops to issue speeding tickets, they need cops to direct the stop and go traffic that surrounds such events.
I think that's hilarious and in a true 1980's movie fashion the police would bungle stealing it back, fess-up to getting caught, the commissioner would step-in, and everyone would have a good laugh. ...Or, in 2000's fashion he'll be marked as a terrorist and in the cross hairs of watch-list databases for the next decade.
Don't screw with the cops man, at best it's a College frat gone bad. However technically right you may be this is playing with fire while surrounded by dynamite.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Thats not really accurate. Speeding by itself is not unsafe. Speeding in sub-optimal conditions is unsafe.
Also, if the limit is 50, but the flow of traffic is going 70, the few cars that ARE going 50 are impeding the flow of traffic and are themselves a hazard. Arguing whether its right or wrong is moot because its just the way it IS.
I know you're just a total and utter slashtard and not someone who actually wants to help him out, but since there's not a snowball's chance in hell that he'll actually read your post, why don't you use the email address that he provides (in clear) to send him your inspiring missive? Just a bit of friendly advice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Ummm, yes. Our rights ARE more important than a few hundred lives. That was kind of the whole point of the revolutionary war.
I don't understand people that think speed limits are moral imperatives that fall on the same line as murder or arson. You people act like I just raped somebody if I want to go 55 in a 50 mile an hour zone.
I live in Houston on I-10, and due to a huge environmental/safety push they lowered the speed limit from 70 to 55. It was a joke, the highway is built for speed and it has excellent lines of visibility and intelligently designed merging sections, and they make you crawl down it. Nobody did the speed limit so they upped it to 60, which didn't really help. As a result you get fast swerving traffic trying to move at the natural pace down the highway, moving through slow road bumps.
If they would pick a reasonable speed limit based on the design of the road, and not the result of some safety pissing campaign then I bet you could get people to actually follow it.
The issue is more where will it stopped. Let's have cameras on all of the street lights "just to protect us". Then, as time passes, "Sir, I noticed that you were watering your lawn at 6:50 AM. You do know that you are breaking an ordinance. Here is your $100 fine." But, heck you are breaking the law. "Excuse me Ma'am. But, we noticed that you put your canary's cage outside. Here is your $10 fine. Yes, I know that the oridnance has been around since 1815, but it is still on the books." It's the law.
Actually it's not cybersquatting per se.
he's using it to complain, not compete.
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I'm no Nascar fan, but, puh-leeze. Citation needed. I'm going to go ahead and assume you think Mario Kart fans have a general disregard for speed limits as well.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
speeding is not a crime. is a manufactured crime designed to generate revenue. nothing more.
Is the Police Department now a commercial entity? Why do they buy and privately operate a .com name?
The police is a branch of the government. For security and trust alone, they should have a .gov in order to avoid being impersonated. And this couldn't have happened either.
There is an opposite approach to this: it's crime prevention by curbing freedoms, in this case, a freedom to go with a speed that a person considers reasonable from his experience.
If a person is guilty of a traffic accident while exceeding the _advised_ speed limit, let him suffer more sever consequences compared to that he would get at a lower speed.
Speed limit is not an undisputed "the only" way to control the safety on the road. Germany for many years did not have one on its autobans (they changed that recently, as far as I recall).
There is a heavy economic price of speed limit, it cripples the throughput of the roads leading to megahours of wasted time of constituents.
I see the speed limit in line with a general trend in developed countries of curbing freedoms in the name of safety.
Speaking of speed, the police should stop people who cannot keep up with the car ahead of them, people that slow down the traffic. It's much easier to detect and it is more beneficial to the society.
Catch bitches that do make up on the left lane or calling on the cell phone at the speed of the turtle.
The only reason the local and federal government is so bent over on the speed limits is that it is easy to sell and relatively easy (see above) to detect. That argument (easy to detect) applies to the insane situation with HOV lanes: the logic dictates that the only cars that should be allowed on HOV lane are those with more than one proud owner of the driving license, not the soccer moms with their kids, not the motocyclists. What prevents the administration at least declare that rule (even if it is hard to implement). At least soccer moms should know that they are driving on HOV lane illegally, meaning that their presence on HOV lane does not help to ease the traffic at all.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
If the speed limit is 50, it was set there for a reason.
My grandmother was nearly killed by a driver going 70 in a 55 zone. Sure "everyone" drives that fast on that mountain highway, but that means that "everyone" is also running the very real risk of running in to someone turning left in an area with rather limited visibility.
speeding is not a crime. is a manufactured crime
You actually typed this, which is hilarious.
"Citation needed."
ha ha ha, and correct.
From what I've seen, stock car fans/crowds are generally better behaved than those at other major events.
How come it's always those who break the rules that complain the most about new techniques to uphold the rules?
"Speeding cameras are against the constitution" - so? Speeding is against the law and kills hundreds of people. Is your constitutional right more important than a hundred lives you endanger?
Just shut up and follow the rules!
Speeding doesn't kill anyone, driving beyond your ability to safely handle the car given the conditions does. Depending on the driver and car along with the current conditions that speed limit could be far too low or even too high. I would far prefer to see the limits raised and stricter training/testing required for a license, the things I see done on the roads are downright scary and a lot of these people shouldn't be driving.
Is your constitutional right more important than a hundred lives you endanger?
Almost certainly. SCOTUS has been very unsympathetic in the past to prior restraint of constitutional rights.
Mere "hundreds" of lives could be saved by restricting many of our constitutional rights. Unfortunately it's a slippery slope, and before long we're housed in tents, eating beans and rice and doing nothing else because it "may endanger the lives of hundreds of people."
Why stop at speeding? And what counts as speeding, anyway? Thousands of lives could be saved by cutting the speed limit to 30 MPH; surely you wouldn't advocate killing thousands just to go 25 MPH faster, would you?
And while we're at it, let's take a real close look at speed enforcement. We can use the "what is the right speed" as a jumping off point, asking ourselves if the speed limits we've set have any relationship to reality -- do they reflect the safety & engineering of our automobiles? Do they reflect the roadways we drive on (road quality, distractions, traffic levels, etc)?
When enforcing the speed limit, are we having a long-term impact on driver's speed choices, or merely a short-term impact? Is the enforcement structured around actual long-term "improvement" in speed choices or other criteria, such as revenue, citation volume, employee management (make-work for idle officers, a kind of punishment for politically inept officers, overtime generation for loyal officers, etc)? Is it merely an excuse to stop people at will for further interrogation? What about speed enforcement as it relates to the level of resources available for other kinds police work given that there's never "enough" resources for law enforcement (or that's what they told me when no one would actively investigate my car's theft or a break-in at my home).
It really doesn't take a ton of time if you think about it to realize that MOST speed enforcement has nothing to do with public policy or safety generally.
keeping the peace is not the same as draconian big brother and a big money making scheme. Notice how all of these speeding camera companies are not non-profits with their CEOs limited to $80k salary? If they want to enforce the speed limit then they should have actual officers there doing the job.
Having been to Bluff City and the Bristol race for many years now,
I can assure you that during race weekend a car goes anything but fast. The traffic in and out of the track is brutal, starting Friday and going well into Monday. 6+ hours before the race, traffic is already backed up for several miles, in both directions. After the race, it can take several hours to get out of Bluff City and be on your way. There are about 500 police officers (local, county and state) and a squad car about every 500 feet for a good mile in each direction because the pedestrian traffic is so heavy. I've arrived at the track 6 hours prior to the green flag and have parked 2+ miles away and walked, just because the traffic so obnoxious.
These camera's in Bluff City have very little to do with Nascar, and I would imagine speeding tickets on race weekend generate but a tiny fraction of the revenue these cameras otherwise generate.
jeff
He gets enjoyment for the $80. He got nothing but frustration for the $90. Sounds to me like the former is money well spent, and the latter not so much.
The reason why they have speed cameras is because they get lots of racing fans because the town is located just south of Bristol Motor Speedway. Nascar racing fans have a general disregard for speed limits and I bet that on a big race weekend one police car could not write tickets fast enough.
Have you ever tried to leave a large sporting event or concert? It doesn't matter how fast you *want* to go -- you're stuck going as fast as the repeated failures to merge/yield allow you to go. That is - about 5 mph. This continues onto the highway as well when we're talking 60k + people in a mass exodus.
Make driving laws about safety and engineering, not revenue creation.
Join the NMA.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Technically, squatting isn't competition. It's extortion: they're forcing you to pay an excessive amount for something that should cost $6. I was looking for a business domain a while back, and I couldn't believe how many domain names were being squatted on. Anything even remotely related to business was already taken, most of them by squatters. We ended up paying a squatter $1000 to get the name that this business legally owned a trademark to. I wonder what would happen if the first-time registration costs for .com was raised significantly and the "free refund" policy was revoked, forcing squatters actually pay for resources they're effectively stealing.
Apparently, a lot of squatters play the float - they register and then unregister domain names just inside the free refund period. Between that and the $6 registration fee, one person can tie up hundreds of domain names very cheaply.
Also, if the limit is 50, but the flow of traffic is going 70, the few cars that ARE going 50 are impeding the flow of traffic and are themselves a hazard. Arguing whether its right or wrong is moot because its just the way it IS.
And jumping off a cliff isn't dangerous until you hit the ground. Just because it's not immediately damaging to exceed the speed limit doesn't mean the consequences aren't much greater if and when you do hit someone (or ram a guardrail) at that greatly increased speed.
As for "right or wrong", it's wrong if the increased frequency and severity of accidents ruins human lives for no good reason other than getting people to work slightly earlier. "That's just the way it is" can never be an adequate response to such pointless, selfish endangerment of other human beings, and I'm disgusted with you for saying such. If you think 50 mph is lower than necessary for a safe speed limit, then say so directly, but the safe, intelligent speed at which everyone ought to travel is not relative to how fast everyone already travels. Would you not have any problem if the freeway nearest your house suddenly traveled at 90 mph? 110 mph?
Exactly the same argument:
"Except that the "crime" can be eliminated simply by increasing the allowable blood alcohol limits.
The fact is, the law should conform to the will of the people, not the people to the will of the law. Such is democracy, such is liberty, such is freedom. If enough people are "drunk driving" on a road to "need" a police check program, either do improvements on the road to make people be able to drive how they want to on there safely, or consider just raising the blood alcohol limit."
The law should conform to the NEED of the people, not the WILL of the people. People are stupid and want to be allowed to do whatever they want. But since I don't want to die while I'm driving I'd appreciate it if you'd follow the damn speed limit.
I agree completely that speed limits should be set sensibly to the road, and that it often isn't the case now, but do you really think that lack of enforcement is the best way to solve that problem?
I know the law is imperfect, but surely it's better to try to fix it than to bitch when technology allows it to be applied thoroughly?
We have a whole shitload of stupid laws on the books that are rarely enforced (not necessarily saying current speed limits are or aren't one of them), and this just leads to a situation where the cops can easily grab you for something or other if they happen to feel like it. Impeding the enforcement of these laws just allows more to pile up. The only real solution is near 100% enforcement - either the law will be generally accepted or you'll finally manage to piss off so many people that the law is changed.
Following this line of reasoning, you'd be perfectly fine with cameras being placed inside your home, right? After all, they are only being placed there to ensure you're not breaking the law. It's really just a reasonable measure to bust the people who beat their wives and have meth labs and such, so no one innocent should have a complaint.
Think of all the crime we'd stop if every household was required to have cameras? We could eliminate the need for 911 calls in so many cases too! And just think of hundreds of thousands of jobs we could save or create to monitor the video feeds!
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Having worked for the police in multiple cities, and for the government in many more, I can safely say that you'll never get a ticket for going 55 in a 50 zone. Yeah, I know there are exceptions, but just don't use that as an argument. It's silly and wrong.
Having said that, I agree with everything else you wrote. Some of the speed limits around here are insanely slow. Cars are different now - they can handle it. It's just the people I worry about. Everybody thinks they're a better driver than everyone else, but none of them are really as good as I am.
Haida Manga
Most of those races see upwards of 60,000 fans, usually over 100,000. They dont need cops to issue speeding tickets, they need cops to direct the stop and go traffic that surrounds such events.
That's what I was thinking... How low is the speed limit there that, in the crush of raceday traffic people are exceeding the limit
You people act like I just raped somebody if I want to go 55 in a 50 mile an hour zone.
Well, unless by driving recklessly you cause an accident and actually kill someone.
So, is "reckless driving" related for driving too fast for reaction/stop times or is it related to tailgating, aggressive driving, and weaving in and out of traffic which is what happens when artificially low speed limits are applied on perfectly safe roads?
I hypothesize that more accidents are caused by said aggressive, distracted, impaired, or unskilled driving outnumber accidents genuinely caused by speed way more by several orders of magnitude. But such a study will never be conducted on the fear that police will lose justification for bullshit speed traps.
More Twoson than Cupertino
No, the real solution is to put the money generated by fines out of the hands of the police department that writes them; you'll see really quick what laws are important to the PD if they aren't seeing money coming in from writing traffic tickets. The only department that should be self funded is maybe the parking ticket guys, since there would be zero incentive to enforce those laws without it (and even that is ripe for abuse). Instead of pulling over people doing 5 mph over the speed limit you'd get them focused on pulling over people driving in ways that are actually dangerous, and of course you'd free up a lot of officers to patrol bad neighborhoods, respond to non-emergency calls (usually took about 90 minutes in Milwaukee at least), and do all the other things that the police should actually care about.
Buy all sorts of iterations of Bluff City PD to make it veritably impossible to get their web presensce back. This is actually a funny, passive aggressive prank and it will teach the police a lesson about responsibility. Citizens still have some freedoms and Brian McCrary did absolutely nothing wrong!
One of these things is not like the others! Can you tell which one it is?
Speeding
Jaywalking
Murder
Failure to signal before turning
Public intoxication
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I am interested in how speeding cameras are against the constitution. That statement itself seems clearly false. There is no right to drive, rather it is a privilege granted by the various state governments. The use of public roads (and even more so private roads) comes with absolutely no expectation of privacy with regards to the path and speed of the vehicle (contents, conversation within, etc. are clearly different). So to what constitutional right are you referring? Your attitude regarding following the rules is disturbing in light of your apparent regard for this as an unconstitutional law. If it was in fact unconstitutional, would not the patriotic person be obligated to break it?
Let's do a check of your facts...
Find me a report that says increases in speed limits increase actual speeds. According to the US DOT, they did a study that found increasing the speed limit did NOT affect the average speed of traffic. http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/home/effects-raising-and-lowering-the-speed-limit/
Next, I would trust traffic engineers too, unfortunately, there IS probably some anonymous guy in Texas setting the speed limit.. A politician. Engineers don't set speed limits.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Up here in Dallas, they seem to set speed limits based on driving revenue. Central Expressway, I-35(E/W), and 635 are all 60 MPH. Dallas North Tollway, 121, and PGBT are 70. The difference being you pay about $1.50 per 10 miles on the latter group. Gee, wonder why they upped the speed limit? Maybe to get more people to use them and get more money for the NTTA?
Doesn't stop everyone and their brother from doing 85 on Central, of course.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Except for the fact that the "crime" can be eliminated by simply increasing speed limits.
The fact is, the law should conform to the will of the people, not the people to the will of the law.
Well, no. The law should promote the overall well-being of the people. There is a difference.
One of the basic examples of this is "the commons problem". If you have a shared resource, and everyone has unrestricted access to it, the resource will ultimately be over-used and abused until it is worthless. Basically, there's going to be someone, somewhere out there who will use this resource selfishly and irresponsibly - and so anyone at all who wants to benefit from the resource must do the same, and try to do it first. The more stable, more widely beneficial case, in which everyone uses the resource responsibly, derives a moderate benefit, and leaves the resource in a condition where others can do the same - it's a kind of equilibrium but not what you'd call a stable equilibrium. Therefore, a resource like that must be managed and protected if it is to be of any benefit.
In the context of speeding limits - one could argue that a higher speed limit serves a few who really feel a need to move faster, while making everyone suffer a higher incidence of traffic accidents (and the resulting traffic jams)
I don't reject the idea that some speed limits out there are ridiculously low - but when the law follows the wishes of the people, it serves only a few. Therefore I reject the idea that the law ought to serve the "will of the people" in all cases.
Bow-ties are cool.
There's nothing inherently dangerous about speeding, aka, driving faster than the posted limit. Driving recklessly, on the other hand, has killed a lot of people.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
You people act like I just raped somebody if I want to go 50 in a 55 mile an hour zone.
If you just want to go 50, GET OFF THE FUCKING FREEWAY.
We need to reinstate the minimum speeds on the freeways. If you can't or won't drive any faster than the frontage/service/whatever you call it road's speed limit, then just take the next exit and enjoy cruising along out of the way of people who have somewhere to be. Around here, the frontage roads are 50 mph and the freeways are 65. That gives us 3+ lanes where people can drive 55, 60 and 65 and pass each other (without exceeding the speed limit... but let's be honest here, everyone does 70 in the left lane). Except that every day there's SOMEONE who thinks they should tow their car at 40mph up the center lane of the freeway. Or drive a cement mixer 30 MPH up one side of the overpass and 60MPH down the other.
At least we've got rules that keep the overloaded dump trucks out of the left lane.
I agree with you completely. Let's take away the money from fines and donate it to the homeless shelters in the city (if you let the city have it it just becomes part of their budget and the incentives for how fines are generated don't change).
Now, how much of a tax increase can I put you down for? Police departments aren't cheap you know, and recently it's become a fact of life that money from fines has to replace money lost from income and property taxes. Especially with unemployment high and people losing their homes. So - a 5% increase in your city taxes? 3%? How much extra are you willing to pay to recover the budget money lost from losing those fines?
Although I completely agree from an ideological perspective that the whole thing is stupid, I'm also perfectly content to drive the speed limit religiously in areas that I either don't know well OR know to be speed traps/covered with cameras and let the fools who like to take chances make up for my tax money. I'd be willing to go along with a tax increase to cover my own ideological problems with the whole setup - I have no ideological problems with paying money for services, and a functional police department actually provides a valuable service to a community - but I doubt I could get my neighbors to go along with it. For some reason they hate taxes more than they like cops.
If I live in a small down, and I buy an empty lot on the corner of Main and McDonalds, it's a good business decsions, but if I do it with a domain name, I'm an extortionist.
Please, someone bought all the land in a hope that it will become valuable letter. The fact that you paid 1000 dollars means it had a value of 1000 dollars, not 6 dollars.
If the price went up, then there would be less new sites. It would in no way hurt the people smart enough to grab something that might go up in values.
They paid the price, they aren't stealing. IN fact, they aren't squatting by any real definition of the word. No more then someone who paid rent is squatting in their apartment.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Because its dangerous to identify with criminals.
Sex offender registries have gotten way, way out of hand in the US. kids that sent other kids pictures of their parts are now on lists, and can never, ever be near children again. It will haunt them the rest of their lives, can't live near schools, show up on job searches, neighbors will see them on the sex offender registries, etc.
Some states, they retroactively put people on the lists that have already served their time. Sometimes, it was kids that had a birthday, and they were just a few days too old to be doing things with their bf/gf, sometimes it was people drunk, urinating in public.
Yet when you think of Sex Offender registries, you think of creepy guys in vans. Some people are trying to speak up against this unfair (and sometimes unconstitutional) treatment, but nobody listens, because in the public's mind, those people are all murderers that drive vans, and prey on kids.
If you have never been tagged by a speed camera, what do you care, in your mind, your a law abiding citizen, and those are the dangerous speeders..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
yeah but that doesn't take into account the people that died in accidents that would have been murdered had they not... sheesh haven't you ever seen Final Destination.
Collector's Edition
"Traffic cameras are a slap in the face of freedom."
Why?
If the speed limit itself is not the problem, how does the technology of the enforcement mechanism make any difference? I don't understand why having a human issuing tickets protects freedom. It just seems more expensive and potentially less impartial.
Erm... sorry man but I have to point out that the National Speed Limit of 55mph was intended to reduce gasoline consumption by 2.2% in response to the 1973 oil crisis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
So in this case the "reason" wasn't safety, it was financial which I believe may be in line with the main article and the opinion of many other posters here.
Last I checked, legal permission to drive a car on public roads was a privilege, not a right. Given that you get a drivers license, it seems hard to believe that driving at (insert speed limit here) + 1 mph is suddenly a "Right." I see this argument a lot. People think that they should be allowed to do anything they want, so long as THEY don't think it will hurt someone else. At best, these people are inconsiderate and need smacked down. (i.e. playing loud music in subway cars.) At worst, they are ignorant, foolish, and/or dangerous. (i.e. 90 mph in a 55 zone, at night.)
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Your evidence contradicts your premise.
Your evidence clearly states everyone going really fast is just as safe as everyone going really slow. It also states that not speeding can be dangerous.
Also your evidence doesn't even address fatalities yet your premise mentions it.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Yes, from context I agree that is a good assumption. His message would have thus been more correct if he'd left out the first sentence.
I was just pointing out how funny it is to phrase it that way.
But to be absolutely clear, I COMPLETELY agree with the sentiment: speed limits are purposely set artificially and needlessly low for the dual purposes of generating revenue and providing police an excuse to make contact with arbitrary members of the public any time they want.
I believe the road should be designed for the speed limit. Lane markers, traffic islands, bollards and margins all delineate an area in which the driver in a car feels they have complete right of movement, and given a clearly marked lane ahead will accelerate to the speed they feel most comfortable with.
if you make the way ahead less obviously marked and force drivers to approach each corner or junction with an eye to where it is safe to drive you force a slowing-down through common-sense that is hard to enforce by law
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The only real solution is near 100% enforcement - either the law will be generally accepted or you'll finally manage to piss off so many people that the law is changed.
That's the perfect solution. I really hate it when people spend all this time and energy to get around laws, to complain about laws, to fight the lawful punishments for those laws, but nothing on getting the laws changed. If this guy's so eager to get the law changed, start a Paypal or something similar to get donations to fund a road study. Take those results (assuming it says the speed should be upped) and a petition signed by voters in the area, and get in front of the city council to get the limit changed. But no, it's easier to buy a domain, setup a website, and whine.
Same thing with the kids in schools where the parents get all huffy when their son or daughter gets suspended for a zero tolerance policy because they took aspirin to school without a note from a doctor. Why didn't they hire a lawyer to fight the rule when it was proposed instead of waiting till their kid gets popped for the offense?
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
If the speed limit is 50, it was set there for a reason.
And usually that reason is arbitrary zoning, not how fast you can drive safely. Two local examples:
There's an interstate highway running through my town, and an interchange was recently completed, with a divided 4 lane street going over the highway. On the north side of the interchange, there's an elementary school, houses and apartment buildings. On the south side, nothing has been built yet. There is literally nothing around for miles - except for back the way you came.
And yet the speed limit is set at 35 for the entire length of the street. How does that make any sense whatsoever? On one side you have kids crossing the street to go to school, and on the other there's still farmland as far as the eye can see - the speed limit could easily be 70 mph instead of 35 mph.
A few miles away, there's a rural highway with a 55 mph limit that forms a T intersection with another street, and the speed limit drops down to 45 mph. Except that other street is currently being converted from 2 lanes to 4, and is totally impassable. Not only is the speed limit still 45 mph, but they haven't turned off the stoplight at the intersection!
People justifiably bitch about speeding tickets because:
1. Limits are seldom based on safety, and usually on arbitrary zoning
2. Limits can be set deliberately low on purpose, in order to rack up more tickets
3. Which means that most speeding tickets aren't about safety, they're a sin tax
I do, however, enjoy listening to anti-all-taxes Republicans bitch about speeding tickets, though. Vote to deny your state and local governments necessary funding, and they will look to other sources....like speeding tickets.
With some googling I found out that in the year 2000 15,517 people were murdered while 41,611 died in car accidents. That means that if we could prevent all car accidents the benefit in human lives would be almost three times greater.
You might only be driving 55 on a 50 mph zone, but a lot of people are driving much faster and statistics show it is fairly dangerous.
Where are these stastics that say ignoring the speed limit and driving the road for what it was built for is "fairly dangerous"? I seem to have found some statistics that claim quite the opposite(pdf warning).
Moreover, by your rationale, I shouldn't be allowed to eat butter or salt as more people die from heart attacks than from car accidents or murders combined. Or to flip it, since you'll likely try to spin this as something I'm doing to you; no one should be allowed to serve things containing cholesterol or salt.
-- ...only life can kill you
Kinda like testing a banking program for buffer overflows by sequentially adding incremental sums. Doesn't reflect real life risk. Want actual safety? Real simple. Send a bug report in for every single crash. Every crash earns someone a point ticket (or several). There are no accidents, only errors and oversights. Either equipment failed or somebody overestimated. Ticket! Use bad judgment AND break a rule? Two tickets. Know yourself and your vehicle, or pay the price.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
You haven't driven in Oregon, have you? They will give you a ticket for 2-3 over.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Who's your admin now [culturally popular descriptive noun self-redacted]!
Yes, because we don't live in a democracy where we can have any effect on what the laws are, or whether bad ones get repealed.
Your answer is not to get rid of bad laws, but rather to oppose any effective enforcement mechanism that removes potentially biased humans from the system?
Liar.
Sorry, I still feel it makes more sense for the city government to decide how big the police force should be, rather than have the police force decide their budget and then fund it by fining people for things that 99.9% of the population are guilty of, including the officers writing the tickets (including when they're on duty). What you're basically saying is that the police department is payed for by a tax on the stupid, that might make a large number of people feel warm and fuzzy, but in my opinion it's a horrible and unfair way to run a government office.
Or you're in Arizona and you don't have your passport on you to prove your citizenship and the judge won't accept the birth certificate your sister managed to convince the county to release to her (since it's not like they're going to let some illegal out on bail and leave the state to pick up their birth certificate) and you nearly get deported to Russia before a Senator steps in and convinces the judge to accept the certificate and release you.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/01/24/25392/immigration-officials-detaining.html
All it takes to fuck you over is a cop willing to claim he "suspected" you were Russian. Or Canadian. Or British, or whatever other country white people come from. Obviously you picked up the southern accent while you were here trying to blend in.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
No, it's not. That why cops and criminal citations were invented. You might want to ask the camera-using governments why they have turned their backs on this tried and true technique.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not trying to troll here, it just seems to me that there are many reasons a jurisdiction might set a speed limit to a specific number.
I don't imagine that it is outside the realm of possibility that a jurisdiction might set an artificially low speed limit to:
1. Generate ticket income.
2. Increase gas mileage.
3. Reduce CO2 emissions.
4. Encourage use of public transportation.
No, it is not.
While it is true that sometimes the border guards along the Mexican border of the U.S. will let you back in without a passport, just a license, they don't have to. It mostly depends on their mood, how polite you are to them, and the color of your skin.
What's really fun is when you're traveling in a car with several other people and they decide to let some of you back in because you remembered your passports, but keep the ones who didn't bring theirs until they can prove their citizenship.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
The cameras in question are nearly 10 miles before the speedway, on one of the two main roads leading to the speedway.
11E is a 4 lane divided highway with a speed limit of 55 or higher except where it passes through stoplights. Bluff City conveniently has a total of 2 stoplights on 11E, although neither one is really necessary.
The two cameras here, along with many more that have been placed in the region over the past couple of years have only been placed in high traffic areas where the speed limit drops below the normal for a very short distance. Those areas have historically been some of the safest & most accident free stretches of road in the area.
The problem, and the common complaint about the cameras and their placement is that the various law enforcement agencies in the area are focusing on generating income by way of fines rather than focusing on reducing accidents and increasing highway safety.
Disclaimer - I live not just in the area, but less than 1 mile from another of the unnecessary set of cameras. I am also familiar with Bristol Motor Speedway, the cameras in question, and the traffic on race weekend from having provided network/server support to the speedway in the past, including during race weekends.
I live in Houston on I-10, and due to a huge environmental/safety push they lowered the speed limit from 70 to 55. It was a joke, the highway is built for speed and it has excellent lines of visibility and intelligently designed merging sections, and they make you crawl down it.
The highway may be built for speed, but the cars are not.
Standard cars can survive a front-end collision at about 50mph, and much above that they start to fall apart. They have about 50 inches of crush space in the front, and it takes all 50 inches to decelerate a car from 50mph. Above 50 mph, the engine goes through the passenger compartment and the passenger compartment falls apart. Once the passenger compartment falls apart, the likelihood of survival is much lower -- almost nil. There are engineering limits to the accident speed that you can design a car to survive.
The most dangerous accident is a rollover. Even if you're wearing a seat belt, there's a lot of energy to dissipate and it's impossible to design a car to reliably protect passengers in a rollover at speeds above 50mph.
But when auto engineers collect 100 reports of fatal or near-fatal accidents, they can see clear patterns and one pattern is that fatalities increase sharply above 50mph, for reasons that make a good high school physics class. (The classical paper is by Nils Bolin in the Stapp Car Crash Proceedings in 1967, if you want to look for it on the Internet.)
There's the old question of what speed do you want to drive at and how many lives do you want to sacrifice for it. With the present speeds we lose (Fermi estimate) 50,000 lives a year. So we're talking about a lot of lives.
You can say, "It's my life and it's my decision what risks I want to take." I'm sympathetic to that.
The problem with that is that most people have a very poor sense of what the risks actually are. You drive on the highway all the time and it *looks* safe, and you've never had any trouble. Life-threatening accidents are rare events. You might have only 1 or 2 accidents like that in your entire life -- and just 1 is enough. You're like the guy who jumps off the 50-story building and passing by the 10th floor says, "OK so far!" But you're going to be driving at night, in bad weather, after a couple of drinks, after a prescribed medication, talking on the phone, while sleepy, with mechanical failures. All it takes is one time.
The other problem is that you're sharing the road with other people. First, if you're driving fast, you're going to hurt them more if they have an accident. Second, they have to keep up with your traffic flow.
65mph was probably the best compromise they could get, but above 55mph you're exceeding the designed crashworthiness limits of the car. It's like climbing without a rope. If you get into the fatal crash of your life, you'll be dead or severely injured. You probably know people who have died in auto accidents above 50mph. Was it worth it?
Its not the right or privilege to drive a car that AC was concerned about. We have fucking cameras watching us and we are prosecuted on what these cameras see. That is NOT right.
I have a right not to be recorded by cameras posted all over the city all the time.
I have a right to deal with a human being and when I'm accused of a crime, and if you've ever tried to contest a parking ticket, you'll realize you get form letters instead.
And no matter how inconsiderate anybody in my city, including I, might be, I have a right for my safety laws to be enforced for safety and not as another way to fill the coffers.
No, I don't like increases in taxes, but if that's what it takes, city officials need to suck it up and break the bad news to everyone. I'd rather hear "we're increasing taxes because the city need revenue" than "we installing cameras to trap people because the city need revenue."
I'd love a little honesty and openess from my politicians, but maybe that's expecting too much.
I'm no Nascar fan, but, puh-leeze. Citation needed.
That's just backwards - you'll never manage to get a Citation up over 55!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Unless you happen to live in an area with an excellent public transportation system, and also happen to work somewhere with one, it seems like driving is positively necessary to, you know, pay the bills and all.
You might argue that one could walk or ride a bicycle or something, but that simply does not reflect the way that the vast majority of people get around. The average commute in the US is 16 miles. That is a distance that is not casually covered in anything but a motor vehicle.
speeding is not a crime that I agree with. if I don't agree with it, it must be wrong.
There, fixed that for you...
As I see it, if you don't like it, work to change it. Until it's changed, however, it is still a law.
-SaNo
17 year old girl!
But she said she was 18!
1) Demand a jury trial.
2) When called to serve on a jury, vote to acquit the defendant if a speeding camera is involved.
3) Contribute to and vote for politicians who will remove the cameras.
4) Repeat until speeding cameras are withdrawn
Average call to shock time in Milwaukee is 8.6 minutes. That is call until paramedics are at the door. Police times aren't tracked in Milwaukee, but Cleveland, Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, and St. Louis, which aren't exactly known for their police response all average well under 20. I sincerely doubt that Milwaukee takes more than four times as long as any of those cities. When you compare the number of tickets issued with overall crimes rates there isn't any relationship. http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2006/2006-048.pdf shows tickets increasing, during a time when crime rates fell. It doesn't seem that those two are all that closely related.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
How would you know the person lacked insurance or was here illegally if they fled the scene? I have no doubt there are countless prejudiced people who blame every hit and run on "an illegal person that does not have insurance". Regardless, what does a person being in the US illegally have to do with an auto accident? I can certainly understand how making it illegal for that person to be in the US will encourage them to flee the scene before the authorities arrive.
When you go to the emergency room a triage nurse performs triage. The nurse will put you ahead of the "many illegals there for exaggerated minor care".
Again, how do you know these people are 'illegals'? Can you just look at them and magically tell they are illegal immigrants? Even if they are, would your emergency room have a higher doctor/patient ratio if all the illegal immigrants were kicked out? The emergency room is staffed based on demand, not based on the number of local legal residents.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Total wealth increases as more people contribute to the economy. The economy is global and complex. It is doubtful you have done the math to support your claim, even at the most basic level. Supposing your claim were true, local businesses do not operate in a vacuum. You can be quite certain that the moment the cost of operating locally exceeds the cost of moving operations to another country those businesses will shut down their local operations and move the jobs elsewhere.
I don't necessarily have an opinion one way or the other on immigration but your comments demanded a response. It looks like your opinion is driven, not by evidence, but by prejudice.
And usually that reason is arbitrary zoning, not how fast you can drive safely.
While this is often true, the object of speed limits is not always just how fast you can drive safely. The next most common reason for speed limits is traffic control -- for example, either setting a low limit discouraging people from taking a particular route (for example, a shortcut through a residential area that could connect two highways) or lowering speed to allow for a greater traffic density.
The latter is particularly important on densely traveled highways at rush hour, which is the reason behind those variable speed limit signs you sometimes see. If everyone is traveling at 30 mph through a zone with things like merges, lots of exits and entrances, etc., they can travel closer together safely and thereby increase the effective throughput. If you decide that it's "safe" to travel 50 mph there during heavy traffic, and then end up slamming on the breaks when someone merges, you can create a traffic wave that ultimately grows and slows traffic to "stop-and-go." Basically, a 30 mph traffic flow may be stable, while a 50 mph one is not for that traffic density.
In that circumstance, the people traveling 20 mph above the posted speed limit actually make the traffic worse for everyone.
Anyhow, this may not be relevant to your particular examples, but it's important to realize that speed limits aren't always just about safety. Most people don't think about this, and we all suffer through traffic jams because of it.
"So, is "reckless driving" related for driving too fast for reaction/stop times or is it related to tailgating, aggressive driving, and weaving in and out of traffic"
Both.
"I hypothesize that more accidents are caused by said aggressive, distracted, impaired, or unskilled driving outnumber accidents genuinely caused by speed way more by several orders of magnitude. But such a study will never be conducted on the fear that police will lose justification for bullshit speed traps."
I grew up in 1960's Australia. There were few cars, no seatbelts, few speed limits and nobody cared about drunk drivers until after the accident had occured. In my state of Victoria the highest ever road toll was in 1969, 1500+ people.
In 1970 madatory seatbelts were introduced, and during the 70's there were a lot more cars and speed limits. By the end of the decade the roll toll was hovering around 1000.
During the 80's speed cameras and booze busses were added and society in general became less tollerant of drunk drivers. The road toll at the end of the 80's was down to ~600.
In 1990 they started a "shock value" advertising campaign (search for "TAC advertisments" on youtube) that shows people the most common ways of killing themself and others with a car, 2 years later the road toll had dropped to where it is now 300-400. In that first 2yrs the TAC* also saved $2B in payouts for deaths and injuries. The ad campaign is still running today.
Of course this is based on deaths but injuries have also seen seen similar drops.
The evolution of regulations over the last 40yrs here has seen deaths drop by 70-80% while at the same time the total number of cars must be at least 10X what it was 40yrs ago. Sure, getting a ticket is annoying, but to say they are ineffective in cutting the road toll is complete bullshit.
* TAC = Transport accident commission, basically a state run insurance company that imposes mandatory third party insurance for death and injury as part of the car's registration fee.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.