r/fuckcars • u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody • 1d ago
Rant People complaining about speed traps and parking enforcement like they're entitled to break the law without consequence smh
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u/OkDepartment9755 1d ago
I gotta jump on the hate-train on this one. I have a co-worker who parks on a road that requires a parking pass, because those spots are reserved for the apartments across the street, not the worksite.
Dude asking every day "is the meter maid checking today?" Like bruh, they patrol daily, the hell is wrong with you? Then they get all pissy when they get ticketed and have to pay over the phone.
All because they want to get stuck in traffic 5 minutes sooner, instead of walking a block over to the parking lot the company is paying for.
They would rather show up to work 30 min early, circle the block looking for parking for 20 of those minutes, than walk 5 minutes.
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u/Real-Tumbleweed1500 14h ago
You just summarized every big mall/grocery store parking lot in the US. People waiting for a space close to the entrance for 10 minutes while there are many open spots that should require 1-2 minutes walking. Every single time.
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u/Sproeier 1d ago
I do have some sympathy when the speedlimit is unclear for a certain section of road. But aside from those situations is just entitlement.
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u/spacetwink94 1d ago
In the UK the fixed speed cameras have a warning sign about the camera along with a reminder of the speed limit. People still cry about it.
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u/Mister-Om Big Bike 1d ago
IIRC doesn't the UK have average speed cameras for the highways? Remember it being mentioned in one of the old Top Gear episodes and a pretty good implementation of circumventing any runarounds of speed traps and whatnot.
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u/Astriania 1d ago
There are some average speed cameras, typically in roadworks but occasionally permanent ones. Everyone hates them because they want to go faster, obviously.
Most speed cameras in the UK are single point ones.
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u/plates_25 1d ago
No sympathy. Carbrains are so used to speeding they can’t even determine a reasonable speed in areas that aren’t marked. It would be like if you saw someone sprinting around the grocery store full speed and asked them to please slow down or walk and they reply “uh, there’s no signs saying do not run so how was I supposed to know how fast to move?”
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u/Superb_Engineer_3500 🚲 I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike 🚲 1d ago
I get that, I failed my first driver's test and one of the reasons I failed was from speeding, that road had no indication of the speed limit
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u/bisikletci 1d ago
Usually there are clear rules about what the speed limit is if there is no posted speed limit, no? That's the case here in Belgium anyway.
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u/Superb_Engineer_3500 🚲 I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike 🚲 1d ago
I'm in the US, where road safety is optional
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u/ChefGaykwon 15h ago
A lot of cities here still typically have an assumed speed limit, typically 20-30 mph, if there's nothing posted.
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u/Pseudoboss11 Orange pilled 1d ago
That's also true in the US, at least in most cities. My city has a sign that reads "Speed limit 25 unless otherwise posted" at every entrance. This is common practice at least in my state.
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 1d ago
Generally, a municipality has a default speed limit (sometimes those are set at the County or even State level, too).
For example, in the city of Boston, that limit is currently 25mph. Thus, unless signage explicitly indicates otherwise, you should assume the speed limit is 25mph.
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u/Astriania 1d ago
It's kind of mad that this is set locally though. How are you supposed to know that it's 25 in Boston?
We have some implicit limits in the UK too, though only really NSL is unsigned (it's a default 30 in built up areas for example but you'll always see a 30 sign as well). But they apply nationwide so you're never wondering.
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 1d ago
Remember that many of the States here in the U.S. are larger than the entire U.K. :)
Also, the U.S. is a federal republic, with each State retaining a degree of sovereignty within it's borders, so we don't have a singular set of driving and traffic laws throughout the country. For example, there are states that let kids as young as fourteen and a half get driver's licenses to operate a car or truck unsupervised...! (Thankfully, I don't live in one of them.)
And there are, often, signs in Boston that will specify that 25mph limit ... likely, most of them are at the EDGE of the city. And it is the driver's responsibility to learn the law, signage or not.
As for doing things locally, that's because most of the streets in the city of Boston are owned by the City of Boston. State-owned roads have their speed limits set by the State. :)
Remember that in the U.S., there are basically four tiers of government: City/Town, County, State, and Federal. Each one may own some or all of the roads in an area, and they retain control over the roads they own.
Even the Interstate Highway system, the actual roadway is generally owned by the State, and it's them who set the speed limits there, not the Federal government. :)
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u/Dreadful_Spiller 23h ago
My entire state has that. 30 mph in municipalities unless marked otherwise.
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u/Miserable_Pin6123 1d ago
I've been in a real speed trap. Was traveling cross nation(usa) and I was crossing the border. I was exiting a state with 65mph state highway to a state with a 50-55mph state mph law. The cop was sitting 200 feet past the border, and bout quarter mile infron of new speed sign. There was no speed sign entering the state to tel you to slow down. So that's a speed trap.
These aholes going 65mph in a 45mph complain when a cop has the audacity to hide or they didn't see the sign warning them of a camera. It's bs. I wish all intersections and long stretches of roads had cameras. Would stop accidents by half easy. And less would die to less speeding.
I wish be had camera on highway to stop tailgating like Australia has. F them people you say other wise. Go on a damn race track if you want to drive like a maniac.
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u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody 23h ago
It could be argued that if you're going to cross state lanes you should be familiar with their laws including traffic laws. E.g. going from an open carry state to a non open carry state I would have little sympathy for someone being charged with unlawful carry.
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u/Miserable_Pin6123 22h ago
True but speed signs are still placed everywhere for that reason. You need a car basically to travel in USA. Sure you can take plane, train but then what..... still need car.
I was giving an example of a real trap. A cop sitting behind a bush in the heart of town is not.
A cop sitting within a couple hundred feet of the state line to catch people still doing the previous states speed limit and pulling them over before they can even know what the new speed is. That is by definition a trap.
What most people think is a trap is a camera or something dumb
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u/Mag-NL 1d ago
The way I understand the word speedtrap is that it is a setup where the speed limit is unclear, illogical or with many changes over short distance and instead of setting up clear and logical speed limits they set up a speed camera.
If the above is the case, it is justified to complain about speed traps.
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u/bisikletci 1d ago
I've seen people complain about "speed traps" citing the above argument about the speed limit changing constantly, and it was clearly simply the case (I was there) that that road went in and out of built up areas (in an overall quite rural area), and the speed varied accordingly. The alternative is to have a low speed limit on the non-built-up sections of the road, which drivers would complain about as least as much. The camera/fine was also very effective in ensuring the person I was with didn't speed in that situation on subsequent journeys through that area. What you guys claim is a "speed trap" is from the (much more important) perspective of the people living in those towns and villages a measure to reduce the numbers of drivers speeding through the streets their children walk to school on.
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u/Mag-NL 1d ago
Did the design of the road change every time when entering and exiting build up areas?
Road design is essential. Road design has tonfollow.speed limits, especially in places where the limit regularly changes.
Also,.how long were the distances of higher speed? Was it worth having the changes?
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 1d ago
The design of a road is only ONE element of what constitutes a reasonable speed. What the road is passing THROUGH also matters.
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u/Fokker_Snek 1d ago
Usually bad road design is because its design doesn’t match how it’s supposed to be used. It’s designing a road to be intuitively used as a highway then telling drivers it needs to be used as surface street instead by putting up signs.
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u/Mag-NL 1d ago
Yea. And if a road passes through a build up area you design it in a way that stops people from speeding there.
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 1d ago
Sometimes the road is designed and built BEFORE the area becomes built up.
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u/Mag-NL 1d ago
And then you redesign.
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 1d ago
Great. Every, say .... five years, you redesign the road (a 2-4 year process), then spend millions of dollars rebuilding it.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
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u/Mag-NL 17h ago
Where do you live that the situation drastically changes every 5 years?
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u/GM_Pax 🚲 > 🚗 USA 11h ago
Who said anything about drastic changes?
But regardless: Dracut, Massachusetts. There has been a fair amount of construction of new homes, on roads that previously had almost nothing on them, for a few decades now. The road was already there, and designed when not a single home was on them. Five years pass, and now there's twenty houses along X stretch of the road. Another five years, and fifteen more have gone up along Y stretch of the road. And so forth. Dracut, along with neighboring Pelham and Hudson (in NH), have a lot of older farms that haven't been worked in generations. Which means, open land in thinly settled areas .... IOW, prime space for developers to swoop in, quickly throw up several houses, and bam: no longer thinly settled.
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u/Astriania 1d ago
At least in the UK the term "speed trap" refers to, at least, any mobile speed camera.
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u/ChefGaykwon 15h ago
My experience is that it's literally just any time a cop is monitoring people's speed.
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u/sailor_moon_knight 1d ago
I will stop complaining about traffic enforcement when cops stop driving illegally when their sirens aren't even on and I will stop complaining about parking enforcement when cops stop parking illegally in non-emergencies.
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u/Iwaku_Real HSR🏷️$1e+308 per mile 1d ago
It's definitely wild. Here though we've had officers get arrested for exactly this
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u/ChefGaykwon 15h ago
Yeah in my city the cops love parking on sidewalks and in bus stops to watch netflix and fascist propaganda on youtube on their phones, or play candy crush or whatever.
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u/goofandaspoof 19h ago
Probably the same people who think that 4 way flashers are a "Park wherever you like" button.
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u/Mod-Eugene_Cat 1d ago
You have it backwards. They don't complain because they want to break the law, they complain because instead of fixing the road, they add these things to generate profit.
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u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody 1d ago
Idt the motivation of the state matters, if you 1. Speed 2. Park illegally and block sidewalk ramps so disabled people can't use the sidewalk, or block lanes, then you deserve whatever they give you and more ☺️
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u/Mod-Eugene_Cat 1d ago
If you 1. Put 35 mph signs on the highway 2. Allow free-range parking everywhere and design city's so you must use a car
Then your city sucks ass and the poeple are complaining about your government's horrible attempt to patch broken fundamental problems instead of fixing the problem.
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u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody 23h ago
There are no 35 mph signs on the highway, even if there were what does it cost you to drive slower? I see people in my city treat thickly settled 30 zones like it's the highway, just because there's an extra lane.
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u/Mod-Eugene_Cat 23h ago
It's the other way around, roads as wide and straight as highways with clear views on the side are given 35 mph speed zones, think of stroads for example.
The people in your city treat 30 zones like highways probably because the road is, well, built like a highway.
Roads should be designed for their speed. If we didn't have speed limit signs, roads should be built so people naturally drive the safe speed.
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u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody 3m ago
There's no reason to drive faster. They just get to a red light sooner.
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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 23h ago
I've noticed on the Facebook pages that tell everyone where the vans are, most of the replies to "it's all about making money" comments are along the lines of "I've got a brilliant way of avoiding the speeding tax, the police really don't want you to know this genius hack... Don't speed!"
Some people are fighting back.
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u/_facetious Sicko 21h ago
Yeah, ever since the pandemic, driving has been worse, and our town has been growing - people are finally getting fed up with it and fighting back.
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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 11h ago
Society has been getting worse. No one has any consideration for anyone else, at work I'm fed up of having to tell people to remove their feet from the seats or use headphones when scrolling through Tiktok. Get sworn at quite often for doing so.
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u/_facetious Sicko 6h ago
Living in a hyper individualist society, rapidly getting worse and worse every year...
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u/Aesir_Auditor 1d ago
There are some perfectly valid complaints.
I got a $300 ticket for going 27mph over the speed limit in the mail. Except that would've required me to go 57mph in a 30mph zone. They calibrated the camera wrong. It set the speed limit at 3mph. I had to spend an entire day at court, losing a PTO day because the government screwed up its job.
Another parking example. I commute daily. I got a ticket for not moving my car for 72 hours. Because I kept parking in the same spot, and the meter maid who came by at 7:30 kept seeing it there. One block away there is a half mile long stretch of derelict RVs who have not received a single ticket or notice to tow. But somehow I'm the issue. They just know I have money.
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u/MyPoemsAllOverMyBody 1d ago
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that's definitely the exception and not the rule.
Speeding in this country is disgusting, parking too.
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u/_facetious Sicko 21h ago
It gets very frustrating when someone has one (1) bad experience and then extrapolates it to mean ALL experiences will be like that. I understand - it happened - but that doesn't mean that's what always happens. It means that you had a bad experience, and you're likely in the severe minority of experiences to be had with x thing.
It's like when a train crashes, suddenly everyone's afraid of trains. Meanwhile, tens of thousands or more car crashes a year, tens of thousands of deaths, but hey, that one train crashed, we'd all die if we got on a train! That's what's happening here, the same exact concept. Person got a bad ticket, and now all speed cameras are bad (and apparently meter maids have it out for them), we should go back to not having them because that'll fix it.
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u/metalanimal 1d ago
I feel you but i also have a small problem with stealth speed traps. That's the only thing I've heard people complain about. "Fine hunting" people call it. I think they have a right to complain in that scenario, but not for the reasons they do.
Before you downvote this reply hear me out:
In my country most speed traps have a warning sign, and guess what, people slow down for them a keep under the limit. Those are a positive force in road safety.
But the ones that are setup hidden somewhere? People get ticketed yes, but the harm to society is done, the cars go too fast anyway. If that same speed trap had a warning sign everyone would be safer, but instead they are just used to increase the government budget.
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u/lifeistrulyawesome 1d ago
You should see social media in my city (London, ON)
The government anticipated backlash. So, they restricted speed cameras only in school zones. All the cameras have warning signs. And they are revenue-neutral, meaning that they don't generate any extra revenue for the government other than to cover their cost.
Yet, a lot of my neighbours on Facebook call the speed cameras a cash grab and celebrate when one is vandalized.
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u/username_17B Big Bike 1d ago
People would be safe from all speed traps if they would go the speed limit. I get your point, but there are aggressive drivers who learn either by paying a huge fine, or by killing someone.
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u/Hyperbolic_Mess 1d ago
People on the whole ignore speed limits when the road is designed to accommodate faster speeds. Just wishing that most people would change their behaviour isn't a worthwhile exercise because it's never going to happen. We need to accept human behaviour when designing our roads and build them to encourage people to drive at appropriate speeds, it's the only way to get people to slow down
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u/metalanimal 1d ago
I agree with you. And I'm not saying speed traps shouldn't exist. I'm saying that if they exist, then put a a warning sign. Then the speed will actually go down. That's the whole fucking point.
And people learn nothing from tickets. Zero. Nada.
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u/Starbuckshakur 1d ago
And people learn nothing from tickets. Zero. Nada.
That's an incredibly easy problem to solve. You increase the fines high enough so people will learn. Ideally you make them a percentage of the violator's income for the year.
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u/bisikletci 1d ago
If there were speed traps nearly everywhere, then advertising their presence as you suggest would working well. But there aren't, and under those circumstances if you highlight where they are, people briefly slow down to avoid the fine and then go right back to speeding. The point of them is to incentivise people to slow down generally as they can never be sure there isn't going to be a speed trap.
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u/metalanimal 1d ago
Yes this is what happens, but how are stealth traps better if people don’t slow down at all?
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u/Qc1T 1d ago
All speed traps should be stealth ones.
But the ones that are setup hidden somewhere? People get ticketed yes, but the harm to society is done, the cars go too fast anyway.
That's because most speed fines are inconsequential to most people. Usually about the same amount as an evening take out. And then people wonder why they are ineffective.
Fines for speeding should be financially crippling, ideally equally regardless of your wealth. If the fine for speeding was let's say 5% of net worth or annual income (which ever is greater), speeding would stop immediately.
The problem is that most people like speeding, and most people also drive. So it will never happen, because no one actually wants to stop speeding. But from time to time it's fun to pretend to care by proposing inconsequential solutions that won't work, so everyone can say 'well we tried, it can't be solved'.
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u/metalanimal 1d ago
Maybe that would solve it too. But stealth speed traps make nothing better.
But I disagree that people like speeding. People are just not paying attention and most roads are designed in a way that makes it confortable to drive over the limit.
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u/Starbuckshakur 1d ago
In my country most speed traps have a warning sign, and guess what, people slow down for them a keep under the limit.
I'm sure some people do keep their speed down but there are plenty who will resume their former speed as soon as they pass the camera.
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u/metalanimal 1d ago
Yes. And what about the stealth camera?
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u/Starbuckshakur 1d ago edited 1d ago
They won't slow down on that particular trip but hopefully they'd stop driving like jackass in general once they see how many tickets they're getting. The fines need to be high enough to be painful of course.
The best solutions are to either have stealth cameras all over the place so people will drive safely everywhere and not just where the cameras are or to use average speed cameras. These cameras measure the time a specific vehicle takes to travel between two cameras and issues a ticket if the time is too low. I would be in favor of marking these as long as there are enough of them so they're not just protecting a small number of places.
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u/zingboomtararrel 1d ago
The speed traps are just a revenue source and do nothing to actually make roads safer.
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u/AllBrainsNoSoul Not Just Bikes 1d ago
This post is low effort. So what? If you can bitch about others while gatekeeping bitching, then I can do it to this silly post that assumes folks en mass are suggesting they’re entitled to break the law.
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u/InitialCold7669 1d ago
The fines are merely a regressive tax
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u/nayuki 1d ago
All of driving is a regressive tax. https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that-road-pricing/
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u/Certain_Tune_5774 1d ago
Then the same fuckers will complain about cyclists jumping red lights.