May Contain Peanuts

Oh S...

Take a second and read this.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/18/1818.asp

Sucks to be a Virginian right now. This law is ri-goddamn-diculous. Thiry-five hundred bucks for speeding? WTF? Has anyone in Congress driven on I-95 in the past 10 years? NO ONE GOES 55 MPH; except for Grandmas and Asian women. Ooh, that's so stereotypical. Yeah, it probably is, but I have seen them with my own eyes. Stereotypes don't invent themselves.

Anypoo, this fine system is out of control. I know the government can always use more money, but this is ludicrous. I can understand making fines steep for really bad speeding, like 20 or 30 over, but three thousand dollars plus jail time plus all those points on the license? Forget about having cheap insurance after that, just more money down the hole. Remind me to get back to the whole 'insurance' thing in another post.

Granted, speeding and aggressive driving cause accidents, hurt people, even kill some of them and overall cost the state a lot of money. This is still quite the step up in penalties though. Perhaps this is a new test to see if a drastic change in penalties will actually slow people down. I know it sounded like a good idea to all gov't people involved. More money for them and less speeders on the highway. It just sucks for the people who get caught speeding.

What is going to be really bad is if this translates to those 35 MPH roads that are wide open and are easy to do 50 MPH on. You know what I'm talking about, there's always some road in a suburban area that is 4 laned and you can easily catch yourself going a little too fast.

Besides the fact that this is a huge cost for a penalty, my main beef with this is that speeding is so commonplace that it makes the times you do get caught seem random and unfair. Everyone goes faster than they should, often people are speeding just to keep up with everyone else. I would hope that those that actually do get pulled over and fined thanks to this new great law are actually deserving of it. You know, the swerving, slamming on brakes and speeding back up type that make you hate other drivers. This kind of thing should not apply to a 'picked-out-of-the-pack' incident or even an open road incident where there is no one else on the road and the cop is just waiting for you to zoom by. Shit like that would really push this too far. I can understand if you are putting people immediately in danger, with the swerving and the tailgating, but when there's an open road in front of you, come on.

It will be interesting to see how this goes over in the next few months and see the citizen's response. I'll be searching for testimonials and results just to see if my thoughts were right on. Looks like I'll be riding with out-of-staters until then. Virginia is for lovers, and out of state drivers.