I don’t know. I speed most of the time (like most people, I think). Every 3 years or so, I get pulled over, and sometimes get a warning, sometimes get a ticket. It’s probably against my interest to call for more rigorous enforcement of these particular laws, but, in a way, I can’t see why not. Of course there should be room for discretion and taking individual circumstances into account, but when you are bagged for breaking what, after all, is the law, one time in a thousand, that is the opposite of overbearing. If speed is not a problem, then the laws should change to a higher limit. If it really is, then the law should be enforced as fairly and uniformly as possible. If people were cited even 10% of the time, they would obey the speed limit laws most of the time. Doing it 0.1% of the time encourages drivers to use their own judgment about how fast to go (which is OK with me), but it erodes respect for law. Laws should be few, clear, and enforced. If we don’t want them enforced, they should be repealed or changed. I don’t buy that police enforce these laws in discriminatory ways. It’s more capricious than that, I think. But having a law and almost never enforcing it sends a message that we have rules but don’t mean it, and how can that be good? Can Freepers with law enforcement experience explain what I have long wondered about, why we have this “system” of very low enforcement rates everywhere?
This isn’t so much about enforcement of traffic laws as it is about encouraging LEO’s to engage in illegal enforcement methods. Kind of like civil asset forfeiture law abuse. If you offer cops a monetary incentive to enforce certain laws, then they’re going to take a loose interpretation of probable cause guidelines in order to cash-in.