Thursday, February 23, 2017

I am ~somewhat~ reformed.

I think Kid Cudi said it best - "People told me slow me roll. I'm screaming out fuck that." Then I got a ticket for doing over 100mph coming back from San Diego. And honestly the first month I was more bummed at how lame my ticket was. If I was going to be forced to stop speeding at least I could have gotten pinched doing like 105 or 130! I was only doing 101. Lame. Mr S. was actually super mad about my attitude.

But then I found out that the law doesn't take lightly to people going over 100mph. It's as bad as drunk driving. Two points on your record. Two points! So I had to hire one of those Better Call Saul ticket lawyers. Who basically told me I was effed. Seriously! He said he was just going to try and not get my license suspended. Other than that? Effed.

Even then I didn't believe the guy so I started talking to everyone to see if he was right. I'd even go to car shows with Ferrari's and all type of performance car and ask the owners if they'd gotten "the big ticket". I was asking everyone. Everyone! They would usually tell me no, and their chuckle told me that guy was right. I was effed. Everyone would laugh at me, which wasn't helpful because I still kinda thought it was funny.

If you think this is bad when you are 20's though, try being older and having more cars. Plus I was going to lose my good driver discount. What?! Other than speeding I'm a good driver! And that ticket stays on your record for a super long time. Like drunk driving. Anyway....

The ticket lawyer was able to plead me down to one point on my record. And now that I know how expensive that potentially is... I'm going to try to keep it under a 100 from now on. I mean, for the next two years I can only normal speed until the ticket drops off my record.

I got super lucky and I'm going to try to be better. Even after I'm not under the threat of going to jail.

3 comments:

  1. Try £2500 if you're caught speeding on a motorway, with three to six points on your driving licence as well as a discretionary ban on driving, and then add to this the fact that if you get twelve points on your driving licence within three years, automatic disqualification terms come into effect that may also include sentencing ...

    Then if your driving licence has been suspended for 56 days or more, it simply no longer exists as valid even after your ban is over, so you have to retake the driving examinations as if you were unlicenced.

    Believe me, it could be much, much worse ...

    Some US states simply bang you into a police patrol car and haul you off for arrest if you're caught doing more than 15 mph over the designated speed limit, with driving bans and mandatory sentencing being likely results.

    The UK is bad enough with average speed cameras and that sort of thing, but with that threat, speeding in the US is not an attractive option at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Holy. crap! You guys have point inflation. I think here, three points will get your license taken away. Sometimes you have to buy special insurance apparently. The lawyer said that if I came to court and the judge took my license they would arrest me in the parking lot if I got into my car.

    Not so thankfully I only do that when I'm on a road trip, because I've done worse. I'm actually pretty glad I got caught in State and not in New Mexico when I was doing 105. But in my defense there was a guy in a Dooly walking away from me at 105. He musta been doing 110. (A Dooly is a truck that has 4 back wheels.) In case you haven't heard of them. They are huge trucks so it's kinda impressive the can go that fast. They are mostly built to pull huge campers. They aren't performance trucks by any means.

    I did still get a big fine. But not as big as two points!

    Just to screw with Mr S. - whenever he tells me how fast a super car goes - I say - challenge accepted. I'm a super tard. A super hard with a good driver discount still though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There are some very mental US states when it comes to this sort of thing ...

    One state has automatic serious crimes penalties for going 15 mph over the speed limit.
    (Yes, that means "felony" in non-Britspeak, and I generally refuse to drive into or through that state, preferring to fly over it instead. As it is an Atlantic state, it is rather a long and inconvenient drive to drive around it, although I have done just that.)

    Another fines you 100 USD per mile you're over the speed limit, and then dangerous driving penalties kick in above a certain amount.

    Yet another deems it illegal to operate radar detection equipment, and they send out radar detector detector patrols to find people who do.

    Most states can't harmonise their default speed limit, so you simply have to know where it's 35 mph, where it's 30 mph, and where there isn't one except as posted.

    City speed limits are anyone's guess, so if you fly into a city's airport and don't get the signage lecture on default city speed limits, you won't have a clue.

    Some of the states can't even harmonise the looks of their signs -- Oregon's speed limit sign for some reason looked too much like the Ontario speed limit sign to me, at least the version without "km/h" on it, and so I wound up driving around ridiculously slow in Oregon for a while until I realised where I actually was at the moment.

    Other states literally throw caution to the wind and ignore the posted speed limits to a point that's determined by that day's maximum wind speed, so that if you are driving 95 mph in a 70 mph zone, the police will simply ignore you because it's the sensible thing to do that day. Naturally, it helps to make friends with the state highway patrol in order to find out what those limits happen to be, although they're generally unofficial guidelines because the state could get in trouble with The Federal Government in Washington DC.

    Another state makes it an infraction simply to allow four vehicles to queue behind you for any reason on a single-lane road or non-dual carriageway, and you have to pull over and let them pass regardless of whether they've just filed out of the church you just passed on Sunday.

    To me at least, Calexit would make sense if only because California could choose to raise motorway speed limits to 130 mph and do a few other things that would reduce the number of police involved with regulatory idiocies imposed by The Federal Government in Washington DC.

    As the eighth largest economy in the world, it's not as if California would starve. :-)

    I've driven across most of California, all of Texas, and all of Montana, and by far California is much worse than either of those. There are B-roads that should have 90 mph speed limits on them -- the desert area around Bakersfield and Paso Robles comes to mind.

    I can totally relate to "I Can't Drive Fifty-Five". :-)

    ReplyDelete