Posted on 09/18/2017 1:46:52 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Since when is the law supposed to be fungible?
Even better — from a certain point-of-view — than a radar trap based on an under-posted speed limit is a radar trap with a changing speed limit. One that can be dumbed-down at random and with no prior notice, at the whim of the same government workers who enforce the limits and profit from that enforcement.
It’s called Variable Speed Limits and the Feds — through the Department of Transportation — are not only encouraging the states to adopt them, they are bribing them to adopt them.
Cue Dr. Evil voice — one billion dollars mulcted from taxpayers has been earmarked to mulct taxpayers a second time via “pilot” VSL programs — and at least nine states (New Jersey — naturally — but also Ohio, Wyoming, Oregon, Utah, Florida, Minnesota, Washington and Georgia) are already deploying VSL.
You may have already seen Variable Limits in action. Instead of the usual metal sign with whatever the number chosen at random happened to be at the time the sign was put up silk-screened permanently on it, an electronic sign — with a display that can be changed, literally, at the touch of a button.
At 4:30 p.m., the sign reads — as an example — 75 MPH. But at 4:33 p.m. (and just after you drove past it) the Oz who controls the sign decides the new speed limit shall be 65 MPH. Blink. Just like that, your moment-ago legal rate of travel has become illegal “speeding” — and not only are you subject to a ticket you are more likely to get a ticket because — as far as you know — you aren’t “speeding” and so why worry about that cop up ahead pointing his radar gun at you?
This gets into interesting turf.
The first is the element of intent, formerly a necessary thing to establish culpability; the idea that a person violated the law on purpose.
But in order for this to be a viable moral concept, the law has to be knowable. A law that is changeable is unknowable. It is — effectively — no law at all. It is the codified whim of whomever has the power to punish people for violating laws that are fundamentally unintelligible.
Kind of like tax law already is. If they want your money, they’ll find some justification to take your money. It’s not about “the law.” It’s about who has power — and is willing to use it.
The second thing has to do with the way speed limits are posted — or rather, are supposed to be posted.
What’s supposed to happen before a speed limit is posted is a traffic study. Monitors set up that observe and record the free-flow speed of traffic on a given stretch of road. The posted limit is supposed to be based on the free-flow speed of 85 percent of the traffic observed — the 85th percentile speed — so that most traffic isn’t ”speeding.”
The idea being that most people naturally drive at reasonable speeds and that speed limits should parallel the organic flow of traffic.
That actually is the law.
It’s called the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (“uniform” italicized to emphasize uniformity — that a thing is consistent, the same), issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation to “… establish national standards for all traffic control devices, including road markings, highway signs and traffic signals.”
States and counties and cities and towns are supposed to use the MUTCD to set speed limits in accordance with the 85th percentile rule but that runs counter to the collection of revenue via “speeding” tickets, which is a major racket for states and counties and cities and towns all across the country.
Some towns and counties and even cities — Washington, D.C. is one — notoriously derive a shockingly large percentage of their annual budgets via roving road taxation; they police for profit. Which you’d think would register with people as a problematic conflict of interest, as regards their interests.
It’s remarkable that it — generally — does not.
Laws that are clearly designed to separate them from their money by dint of legislatively putting eight out of ten and usually more like nine out of ten people into the category of “violator” — by dint of limits set purposely below reasonable speeds, let alone the 85th percentile speed.
This Variable Speed Limit thing will net that tenth person. It will open up a whole new revenue stream by making it possible to issue “speeding” tickets at will to any driver — unless we all drive well below whatever the limit-for-the-moment happens to be. If the electronic sign says 65, drive 55 — in order to be within the safe zone (as far as being a target of the road tax) when Oz pushes the button and the limit drops to 55.
Now imagine Variable Speed Limits tied in with automated speed enforcement — the camera systems already in place in many states that don’t even require an armed government worker to do any work to separate you from your cash.
You unknowingly transgress the just-changed limit by 10 MPH and are duly processed by the speed camera a mile past the sign. A week or so later, you get an extortion note in the mail.
Pay up, chump.
Most of these automated ticket spewers are not subject to the once-mandatory rules of evidence, either. That is, it’s no longer the burden of the government to prove you did something but rather your burden to prove — to the satisfaction (usually, not) of an “administrative” bureaucrat that you did not.
All of this is already reality in the UK — the source waters for many of our policing for profit (and police state) woes.
As far as what can be done?
Just as it’s very sound policy to have a really good tax lawyer on retainer to deal with the IRS, you might want to acquire a really good radar detector. With speed limits changing at the whim of Oz, you might want to know where his flying monkeys might be lurking.
It was called “wasting a finite resource” and no points on your record.
But if it saves one child’s life....
I would strongly recommend that these ‘variable’ signs be yanked out of the ground with a chain every time they are erected.
I have left hard earned dollars in small speed trap towns in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina.
They don’t need no electronic signs or even a radar.
All they need is an out-of-state tag on your car.................
Yep, the License Plate Lottery.
Between the exit off I-95 and my house, there are at least four different speed limits. The whole distance is maybe five miles. Maybe.
Just don’t speed.
I did the math once. In mos of your daily trips you will never go more than a half hour. Even in a half hour trip you stop and go.
So driving like a maniac your AVERAGE speed rarely increases by few MPH.
Even in the BEST CASE where you have a straight shot with no stops, you can only increase your speed by enough to ride safely in traffic.
So... in the best possible case, you drive 60 MPH instead of 40 for a straight line of 20 miles.
When you drive at 40 you get there in a half hour. If you drive 60 you get there in 20 minutes. In the absolute best possible case you only save 10 minutes.
And every short drive scenario plays out worse than that.
With stops ans starts and turns and everything you rarely save more than 5 minutes.
Just leave 5 minutes earlier for everything and you save gas, don’t cause traffic problems, don’t get a ticket EVER and don’t risk your life.
That’s why you can never eliminate poverty as long as poverty is defined as the lowest quintile of income.
The same logic applied to long trips would have you doing 10 or 20 mph over the limit.
“It’s called the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (“uniform” italicized to emphasize uniformity — that a thing is consistent, the same), issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation to “… establish national standards for all traffic control devices, including road markings, highway signs and traffic signals.”
This is worse than the mere “variable speed limit” issue. Worse because (using federal purse strings on “federal transportation funds”) it interjects FEDERAL LAW into areas of transportation where any federal ruling is not just unnecessary but an unwarranted extension of federal power.
The “variable speed limit” issue can tested in the courts, but getting the federal government OUT of the business of “setting standards” where no “national standard” is needed will require a Congress elected to deconstruct the Liberal/Progressive deep state and its tentacles into EVERYTHING.
Jerry Brown and his Merry Band of Latino Communists will love it.
Dash-cam cameras...video streamed/stored in as many places as possible.
For one thing, every jurisdiction where I've worked that has considered adopting these variable speed limits was dealing with a problem of high-speed crashes on stretches of roadway where the roadway geometry could safely accommodate a vehicle traveling at 100 mph, but where the road was heavily congested during peak travel periods in the daytime.
The author doesn't even see the contradiction right there in his own narrative:
States and counties and cities and towns are supposed to use the MUTCD to set speed limits in accordance with the 85th percentile rule but that runs counter to the collection of revenue via "speeding" tickets, which is a major racket for states and counties and cities and towns all across the country.
The whole point of a variable speed limit is that on major roads in most metropolitan areas, the 85th percentile speed changes by time of day. It might be safe to drive 75 mph in the middle of the day or in the dead of night, but reckless and dangerous to drive at that speed during rush hour.
You can’t have it both ways. If the Federal government has no legitimate constitutional authority to regulate interstate highways, then states have no business holding their hands out, begging for Federal matching funds for major highway projects on the grounds that they are assets of national importance.
>I would strongly recommend that these ‘variable’ signs be yanked out of the ground with a chain every time they are erected.
Accidental fire damage might be more effective.
I am not asking to have it both ways and nothing I said implied I was.
On the other hand, there is no such as “federal” dollars and EVERY federal fuel tax dollar that federal agencies have was dragged, by taxation, from every local village, town, city, county state and region, so other than some equitable apportion of it, why should it have any other federal strings to it. It shouldn’t. Either get rid of the unnecessary strings (as well as the non-transportation expenditures from the federal “transportation ‘trust fund’ “), or qet rid of the federal fuel taxes completely and leave the money in the states.
It is only state corruption and lack of state spending priorities that creates the fiction that federal transportation funds are a “gift” from the federal government. Every dime came from legalized theft FROM THE STATES & the sole purpose of it IS federal meddling.
Drive from El Paso to Texarkana averaging 80 miles an hour, and it will take you just over 10 hours. Drive it at your 40 miles an hour, and it will take over 20 hours. And you will be so tired after 20 hours of driving, you’ll probably have a wreck.
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