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Speed traps catch people actually committing crimes. While you as a driver may be disappointed you can't speed (read: break the law) with impunity, I as a pedes

Speed traps catch people actually committing crimes. While you as a driver may be disappointed you can't speed (read: break the law) with impunity, I as a pedestrian and public transit user would prefer more speed traps and harsher enforcement. On the other hand, what happened in the linked article appears to be the FBI seizing the women's assets with approximately zero evidence she committed a crime.

lupusreal 2y ago
Speed traps are frequently paired with abrupt and arbitrary changes to the speed limit which exist for the purpose of the speed trap. People who go fast through those are technically breaking the law, but morally they're doing nothing wrong (unless you're the kind of servile worm who derives morality from the law.)
- cmeacham98 2y ago
  I've never seen any strong evidence for this (only a handful of anecdotes), and my personal experience driving doesn't match. I saw speed traps all the time and don't remember a single one that was associated with a speed limit change. Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit.
  - guappa 2y ago
    I've also never personally been to NYC or Antartica, thus neither of these places really exists.
    - exe34 2y ago
      when you assert that something exists, it is generally expected that you would point at documented examples. for example, consumer protection organisations, or petrol lobbies, etc might have an interest in documenting those things. do those documents exist?
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio# The south catches a bad rap for speed trap towns but seems like every 10yr or so some town in the midwest abolishes its police department or something because of that sort of behavior.
        exe34 2y ago
        once every ten years doesn't sound as bad as the others have been making it out to be.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    > Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit. Legally, of course. But there is such a thing as an artificially low speed limit. If the road conditions allow driving in safety at 60 km/h but a town installs a sign that says that you have to drive at 10 km/h, with no pedestrian traffic or bends or anything at all that could justify it, then that is a speed trap, and drivers who drive the normal speed of 60 on that stretch are not doi g anything wrong, the law is just being abused against them.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      In Czechia, the maximal jump between two signs is, AFAIK, 30 km/h, so as not to require abrupt braking.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      So I see people saying this all the time, but they forget one crucial factor - noise. Roads next to houses have lower speed limit not just because of people on the road or sharp turns, but because cars driving faster generate more noise(exponentially more noise in fact).
  - Fluorescence 2y ago
    The equivalent in my area are "bus gates" i.e. lanes at junctions reserved for buses during certain periods that automatically generate fines. In principle, great, but the trick is that the signage is such an inscrutable combination of badly placed adhoc signs and road-markings that a huge number of visitors with zero intent to breach a rule get fined. There is a common sense principle such things should meet: if the revenue from a traffic measure is high and consistent then not only has it failed in it's purpose to change behaviour but there is something bogus about it's setup. A judge first ruled the signage was fine but after seeing so many appeals, he admitted he had been definitively proven wrong and it needed to be improved.
  - selfsimilar 2y ago
    Here’s a Propublica article about a Louisiana town that exists financially from traffic fines. https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-in-1-million-through-mayors-court https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Then it wasn’t a speed trap. Just running radar is not a speed trap, it’s enforcement. Speed traps are as described by others: abrupt, significant changes in speed limit with minimal warning and poorly-visible signage. Look up the story of Waldo, Florida, which for years and years did this on US 301. The town lies on the main route between Gainesville, location of the University of Florida, and Jacksonville, where it meets I-95 and thus access to points north along the East Coast. It was one of the few places that the American Automobile Association would directly call out as a speed trap. I know that Alabama has had a series of laws starting in the 90s passed by the state legislature to rein in such activity. Not entirely successful, but not without its victories, either.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      Large jumps should be plainly illegal, and bad visibility of signage should be a defense in the court. This has to be legislated at the state level, though, or the municipalities will go wild in their policing for profit.
      - devilbunny 2y ago
        These always slide by because the cost of defending yourself in court is enormous even if you have a completely simple case that anyone with a modicum of intelligence could handle. You can’t do it remotely.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    You are being wilfully obtuse. https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... https://reason.com/2022/05/08/11-insanely-corrupt-speed-trap-towns/ https://reason.com/2022/05/08/11-insanely-corrupt-speed-trap... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-end-small-town-new-laws/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-e... > Waldo, Florida, is just two square miles, and Highway 301 runs right through the village, but the highway speed limit changed six times, enabling police to write thousands of tickets a year. The AAA put up a billboard warning drivers. It's the responsibility of town planners, etc. to design roads and their speed limits for safe traffic flow. Sudden speed limit changes are dangerous, and a much safer approach - if, say, a highway runs through a village for two miles, with multiple junctions - is to have a single speed limit for the entire stretch. Not to have speed ups and slow downs, aggressive enforcement, and evidence that the majority of your village's funding comes from fines. That is municipal malfeasance.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    >> Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit. That's not how driving actually works in practice. Most of the time drivers rely on a learned sense of what the standard speed limit is based on the type of road. E.g. highways are 65 - 70, major roads are about 55, neighborhoods are 25 - 35, etc. When I learned to drive, the state's drivers manual literally had a section on what speed limit you should assume on different types of road if you haven't seen a sign. That's to say nothing of situations where the sign is actually hidden. For example, I was once pulled over on a road that abruptly dropped more than 25 mph, on a significant downward slope, where a tree was growing in front of the speed limit sign.
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      Did you fight it? The tree should have gotten your ticket thrown out.
  - tekla 2y ago
    You have never driven through Utah. My one and only speeding ticket ever was when the speed limit changed from 55 to 30, and the sign was behind a turn and a cop was right there who grabbed me immediately. Of course the speed limit went back up to 55 about 100 feet after that. I hyper noticed this BS everywhere since.
guappa 2y ago
I'm not sure that violating a speed limit going abruptly from 100 to 10, with the sign hidden behind a bush, and without any apparent reason for the limit to be changed is anything else than a scheme to collect money.
- teeray 2y ago
  This is why, IMO, municipalities should have no ability to set their own speed limits. They should be specified by a disinterested third-party engineer at design time and be immutable without physically changing the road, or certain aspects of the road’s use (building a school, for example).
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Or evidence that the existing speed limit is unsafe (e.g. good arguments, car accidents) and should not have been set in the first place.
potato3732842 2y ago
Current civil engineering best practices is that if a sufficient amount of traffic is violating the limit the limit is what's wrong. Several states use methods consistent with this to set their speed limits generally. Many do not. Regardless, this is a distraction. Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Rules that come with force of law should not substantially deviate from what average people consider acceptable. Furthermore, these sorts of bad laws aren't just limited to property seizure and speeding. From federal tax law to municipal zoning these is no shortage of these sorts of laws, rules with force of law and precedents that are crafted in such a manner as to give the enforcers unilateral power to take as they please and with checks limits generally only existing not to prevent abuse but to prevent the enforcers from getting so greedy that their racket gets outlawed. All examples of such laws and rules are bad and ought to be done away with. Thank you for illustrating exactly what one of the enablers of these sorts of bad policies looks like. I will leave imagining what a similar argument in favor of civil asset forfeiture looks like as an exercise for the reader.
- brabel 2y ago
  > Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Good luck lobbying the town to change the speed limit. They don't care what you think about the limit, if you drive past that speed you'll have to pay. And just to rant a bit: as someone who lives on a too-straight street (but very local and with pedestrians, including, children, walking on often) where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit because they probably think they know best what's "acceptable", I would love them to get hefty fines every time they did it.
  - nick__m 2y ago
    The problem is that the road design doesn't fit its usage. In an ideal world the street would be redesign so the driver naturally adopt the desired speed limit.
    - ajmurmann 2y ago
      To add to this, "redesigned" doesn't have to mean making it less straight but cheaper things like making it narrower will also slow down traffic.
glitchc 2y ago
Afraid not. Most regular traffic is aware of speed traps, it will slow down in the zone and speed up right after to make up time. It's far more effective to lower the road's natural speed by introducing curves, roundabouts, rumble strips, flexible barriers and speed bumps.

lupusreal 2y ago

Speed traps are frequently paired with abrupt and arbitrary changes to the speed limit which exist for the purpose of the speed trap. People who go fast through those are technically breaking the law, but morally they're doing nothing wrong (unless you're the kind of servile worm who derives morality from the law.)

cmeacham98 2y ago
I've never seen any strong evidence for this (only a handful of anecdotes), and my personal experience driving doesn't match. I saw speed traps all the time and don't remember a single one that was associated with a speed limit change. Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit.
- guappa 2y ago
  I've also never personally been to NYC or Antartica, thus neither of these places really exists.
  - exe34 2y ago
    when you assert that something exists, it is generally expected that you would point at documented examples. for example, consumer protection organisations, or petrol lobbies, etc might have an interest in documenting those things. do those documents exist?
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio# The south catches a bad rap for speed trap towns but seems like every 10yr or so some town in the midwest abolishes its police department or something because of that sort of behavior.
      - exe34 2y ago
        once every ten years doesn't sound as bad as the others have been making it out to be.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit. Legally, of course. But there is such a thing as an artificially low speed limit. If the road conditions allow driving in safety at 60 km/h but a town installs a sign that says that you have to drive at 10 km/h, with no pedestrian traffic or bends or anything at all that could justify it, then that is a speed trap, and drivers who drive the normal speed of 60 on that stretch are not doi g anything wrong, the law is just being abused against them.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    In Czechia, the maximal jump between two signs is, AFAIK, 30 km/h, so as not to require abrupt braking.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    So I see people saying this all the time, but they forget one crucial factor - noise. Roads next to houses have lower speed limit not just because of people on the road or sharp turns, but because cars driving faster generate more noise(exponentially more noise in fact).
- Fluorescence 2y ago
  The equivalent in my area are "bus gates" i.e. lanes at junctions reserved for buses during certain periods that automatically generate fines. In principle, great, but the trick is that the signage is such an inscrutable combination of badly placed adhoc signs and road-markings that a huge number of visitors with zero intent to breach a rule get fined. There is a common sense principle such things should meet: if the revenue from a traffic measure is high and consistent then not only has it failed in it's purpose to change behaviour but there is something bogus about it's setup. A judge first ruled the signage was fine but after seeing so many appeals, he admitted he had been definitively proven wrong and it needed to be improved.
- selfsimilar 2y ago
  Here’s a Propublica article about a Louisiana town that exists financially from traffic fines. https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-in-1-million-through-mayors-court https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...
- devilbunny 2y ago
  Then it wasn’t a speed trap. Just running radar is not a speed trap, it’s enforcement. Speed traps are as described by others: abrupt, significant changes in speed limit with minimal warning and poorly-visible signage. Look up the story of Waldo, Florida, which for years and years did this on US 301. The town lies on the main route between Gainesville, location of the University of Florida, and Jacksonville, where it meets I-95 and thus access to points north along the East Coast. It was one of the few places that the American Automobile Association would directly call out as a speed trap. I know that Alabama has had a series of laws starting in the 90s passed by the state legislature to rein in such activity. Not entirely successful, but not without its victories, either.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Large jumps should be plainly illegal, and bad visibility of signage should be a defense in the court. This has to be legislated at the state level, though, or the municipalities will go wild in their policing for profit.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      These always slide by because the cost of defending yourself in court is enormous even if you have a completely simple case that anyone with a modicum of intelligence could handle. You can’t do it remotely.
- amiga386 2y ago
  You are being wilfully obtuse. https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... https://reason.com/2022/05/08/11-insanely-corrupt-speed-trap-towns/ https://reason.com/2022/05/08/11-insanely-corrupt-speed-trap... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-end-small-town-new-laws/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-e... > Waldo, Florida, is just two square miles, and Highway 301 runs right through the village, but the highway speed limit changed six times, enabling police to write thousands of tickets a year. The AAA put up a billboard warning drivers. It's the responsibility of town planners, etc. to design roads and their speed limits for safe traffic flow. Sudden speed limit changes are dangerous, and a much safer approach - if, say, a highway runs through a village for two miles, with multiple junctions - is to have a single speed limit for the entire stretch. Not to have speed ups and slow downs, aggressive enforcement, and evidence that the majority of your village's funding comes from fines. That is municipal malfeasance.
- harimau777 2y ago
  >> Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit. That's not how driving actually works in practice. Most of the time drivers rely on a learned sense of what the standard speed limit is based on the type of road. E.g. highways are 65 - 70, major roads are about 55, neighborhoods are 25 - 35, etc. When I learned to drive, the state's drivers manual literally had a section on what speed limit you should assume on different types of road if you haven't seen a sign. That's to say nothing of situations where the sign is actually hidden. For example, I was once pulled over on a road that abruptly dropped more than 25 mph, on a significant downward slope, where a tree was growing in front of the speed limit sign.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    Did you fight it? The tree should have gotten your ticket thrown out.
- tekla 2y ago
  You have never driven through Utah. My one and only speeding ticket ever was when the speed limit changed from 55 to 30, and the sign was behind a turn and a cop was right there who grabbed me immediately. Of course the speed limit went back up to 55 about 100 feet after that. I hyper noticed this BS everywhere since.

guappa 2y ago

I'm not sure that violating a speed limit going abruptly from 100 to 10, with the sign hidden behind a bush, and without any apparent reason for the limit to be changed is anything else than a scheme to collect money.

teeray 2y ago
This is why, IMO, municipalities should have no ability to set their own speed limits. They should be specified by a disinterested third-party engineer at design time and be immutable without physically changing the road, or certain aspects of the road’s use (building a school, for example).
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Or evidence that the existing speed limit is unsafe (e.g. good arguments, car accidents) and should not have been set in the first place.

potato3732842 2y ago

Current civil engineering best practices is that if a sufficient amount of traffic is violating the limit the limit is what's wrong. Several states use methods consistent with this to set their speed limits generally. Many do not. Regardless, this is a distraction. Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Rules that come with force of law should not substantially deviate from what average people consider acceptable. Furthermore, these sorts of bad laws aren't just limited to property seizure and speeding. From federal tax law to municipal zoning these is no shortage of these sorts of laws, rules with force of law and precedents that are crafted in such a manner as to give the enforcers unilateral power to take as they please and with checks limits generally only existing not to prevent abuse but to prevent the enforcers from getting so greedy that their racket gets outlawed. All examples of such laws and rules are bad and ought to be done away with. Thank you for illustrating exactly what one of the enablers of these sorts of bad policies looks like. I will leave imagining what a similar argument in favor of civil asset forfeiture looks like as an exercise for the reader.

brabel 2y ago
> Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Good luck lobbying the town to change the speed limit. They don't care what you think about the limit, if you drive past that speed you'll have to pay. And just to rant a bit: as someone who lives on a too-straight street (but very local and with pedestrians, including, children, walking on often) where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit because they probably think they know best what's "acceptable", I would love them to get hefty fines every time they did it.
- nick__m 2y ago
  The problem is that the road design doesn't fit its usage. In an ideal world the street would be redesign so the driver naturally adopt the desired speed limit.
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    To add to this, "redesigned" doesn't have to mean making it less straight but cheaper things like making it narrower will also slow down traffic.

glitchc 2y ago

Afraid not. Most regular traffic is aware of speed traps, it will slow down in the zone and speed up right after to make up time. It's far more effective to lower the road's natural speed by introducing curves, roundabouts, rumble strips, flexible barriers and speed bumps.