Just finished this up, thought that since we seem to be a speeding ticket prone group you might be interested.

The Random Regressive Roadway Tax
The speeding ticket system in the United States has become a mismanaged racket, and is in need of change. Highway speeds are higher now, legally or not, thanks to advances in automotive technology such as increased safety, more stable cars, and better braking systems. Highway 101 to San Jose is three lanes wide and even wider at some points; the speed limit is 65 miles per hour but the accepted speed is 80 miles per hour, sometimes even faster depending on traffic conditions. In all honesty, going the speed limit and having cars swerve around you is more hazardous than exceeding the limit in this case, but don’t tell that to Officer Radar of the California Highway Patrol. He will say that he is just there to slow you down and keep you safe, if by “keeping you safe” he means generating revenue for his department – and for your insurance agency.
A blind eye is turned to the inconsistencies of safety and the speed limit. The safest traffic is where everybody is within a few miles per hour of each other, with the slower traffic on the right and the faster traffic passing on the left. It is simple physics that the relative speeds of two cars going in the same direction is proportional to how much force would be expended in any resulting collision. A car going 80 miles per hour that rear-ends a car going 79 miles per hour will result in a collision that is miniscule compared to a car going 80 hitting a car going 65. This does not take into account that the closer the relative speed between cars, the more reaction time there is available for a driver to avoid an accident. Artificial speed limits that do not reflect the capacity of a road create a traffic environment where some people go an appropriate speed for the road and its conditions, while others try to claim the moral high ground and stick to the speed limit, often while blocking the left lane to ensure that everyone behind them must follow their ideal velocity. This just enrages other drivers who do not want to have their driving speed dictated by someone else, and often results in dangerous passing maneuvers. In addition, this lack of lane courtesy is a safety hazard in that someone could have a valid reason to speed, such as a medical emergency, and be prevented from reaching a hospital in a timely matter.

*To be continued....and I wanna post ***** it up a bit*

 

*Now where were we?*

If the Highway Patrol were really interested in keeping people safe, they would concentrate more on keeping traffic going a consistent speed than on randomly selecting drivers to pay a hefty fine. Police single people out of a line of cars to ticket for speeding, when really the very ones whom they select are at the lowest risk of an accident. Fines randomly imposed on people who are doing nothing wrong, most likely just keeping up with traffic, are an unfair and regressive tax. Why should someone working the checkout at a supermarket, and is barely making ends meet as it is, have to pay the same fine as a wealthy businessman? Such an undue hardship placed on someone who is already economically shaky could result in near ruination, compared to what that fine means for someone of the upper class. That speeding ticket could be about as much as the businessman pays for lunch, but for someone working minimum wage, it can be more than a week’s pay, in addition to the sharp spike in insurance rates that can linger for years. We pay income tax based on how much we make, so why should a random and unlucky lottery-turned-tax favor the rich so much while squashing the poor, especially when a ticket was given in a situation where it was actually safer to speed and keep up with traffic? Is it that the rich are the only ones worthy of safety? According to our backwards and ineffective traffic control system, yes.
The police have taken to sneaky measures to insure that their revenue from speeding tickets stays high. I personally have been given a ticket from an undercover officer who, while driving in an unmarked, champagne-colored Mercury Sable, proceeded to tailgate me after I had passed him on the freeway. I had no way of telling he was a police officer so I sped up fearing becoming the victim of road rage. He gave me a ticket for that, making my second speeding ticket. I have never been in an accident though, and looking through my group of friends who have all been driving for about the same time, I can see no correlation whatsoever that people who get more speeding tickets are involved in more car accidents, contrary to what my insurance agency would have me believe. My girlfriend also has two speeding tickets (one from an undercover car) and has had no accidents. One of my friends has been in two accidents and has no tickets, along with one who has had one accident and one ticket, one who has had an accident and no tickets, and one who has had no accidents and one ticket. Granted this is a very small sampling, but the correlation that is supposed to be clear as day is not there. I should not have to pay higher insurance; I am deemed a higher risk, though I have never been involved in the very thing that insurance is supposed to deal with – the risk of accidents.
The traffic court system is largely an abuse of power. People who want to fight their ticket face an uphill battle. They must pay the court fee, which can be hundreds of dollars by itself, and possibly pay for a lawyer to represent them, both of which are money down the hole, even if the defendant wins. This is in addition to the money to pay for the ticket and the increased insurance rates if the defendant loses. Then are the seemingly endless and cryptic forms to fill out, the court dates to attend, which also mean that work must be missed that day, and the fact that throughout the trial it is the word of the lone defendant against that of the citing officer, and the court sees radar usage as all but infallible. As William Grim writes “The municipal traffic ticket industry is a fraud. It steals money from law-abiding citizens; it makes people lose faith in the impartiality of our legal system; and it diverts many police officers away from doing real law enforcement work in order to become tax collectors with guns who are more interested in hitting their monthly quota of traffic tickets than in apprehending actual criminals”. (Grim) It really is sad that our traffic police are more concerned with revenue than the safety of the people who pay their wages.

*Take a moment to relax your eyes*

 

*Begin straining your eyes again*


A highway can be thought of as a river. There is a set amount of traffic traveling along the highway, representing the volume of water flowing in the river. If the speed of the water is reduced, there will be an increased volume of water in the river. Just like the river, if highway speed is artificially reduced, there will be an increase in the volume of cars that travel it, leading eventually to the critical mass necessary for a traffic jam.
While opponents of increased speed limits often state that the faster a car goes, the more gas it will use, so we should just set the speed limit low to save gas, in reality it is just the opposite. Lower speed limits lead to more congestion, as there are more cars are on the road for longer. If you are idling while stopped in traffic you are getting exactly zero miles per gallon, and you car is nothing more than a glorified lawn chair with a gasoline powered air conditioning unit. This wastes time, energy, money, gasoline, highway space, as well as personal and collective sanity, along with the fact that pollution is being needlessly released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. It would be so much more effective to just have people get to where they are going quickly and safely and then get out of the car, which could be accomplished through higher speed limits which people would actually follow and a little creative highway design.
In conclusion, the current state of highway speed enforcement is unfair, ineffective and in many cases unsafe. Profits have been favored over people, worst of all not by some greedy corporation, but by our own government. Through the use of a large force of police with high tech equipment to randomly pull over and charge unwitting citizens, a court system that turns the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” on its head, and the third party of the automotive insurance agencies encouraging the entire affair, the speeding ticket system has made a mockery of our form of government and of our ideals of equality and freedom.

*End*

Feel free to tell me what you think, even if you think I am a dirty rotten bastard for writing that.

 

too much to read.



head is going to explode

 

Cliff notes: f0ck da police!!!!1

 

That is not long.

 

So wait.

Is your paper about traffic fines being a "regressive tax", traffic safety, the court system, insurance costs or what?

What was the prompt for this paper?

 

i need to write my paper soon on privilege.

whats your thesis/point of argument?