A sad side effect of our culture that can be minimized by procuring a good quality detector.
I think it's money well spent - I'm gonna upgrade from my old 'goes off when someone farts' detector for the best unit under $500. That's what it's worth it to me.




...Yeah and sometimes it's better not to know when somebody farts.

 

Sadly true words Graphic Guy. Here in Arizona most of the rural counties live by the revenues received from traffic tickets. Because many of these counties have extremely small tax bases they need other forms of revenues to help pay for required services. The state doesn't contribute much and the Fed's are just as bad so the counties direct local services to find ways of generating additional revenue.

I had a friend who was a county sheriff's deputy in a rural Arizona county. He once told me about the unofficial benefits of writing lots of traffic citations on county patrolled highways. In some places its just a sad fact of life.
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Martimus.....while I don't agree with any gov't agency trampling on the rights of the individual for monetary gain (which is the case in most speeding ticket fines), I do understand that some municipalities do rely on that revenue to continue functioning.

Personally, I'd rather they be upfront about it. Tell the public...."hey, we can't afford the services we provide to the public if we don't have speeding ticket revenue. So, we're going to patrol and ticket anyone going 10 MPH or above over the limit".

They don't do that, though. They hide behind the bogus safety issue. OK, if that's the way you want to play it, I'm going to use whatever tools at my disposal (radar detector) to thwart your efforts.

This is really off topic but it segues into the whole tax base issue you allude to, though. If any area is having trouble with meeting expenditures with their tax base, they need to say to the public...."hey, if we don't raise taxes by X amount, these are the services we're going to have to cut". If the public doesn't care enough about the cut in services, then they probably don't need them anyway. Conversely, inform the public of the service cut, let them decide whether they want to pay for it. If they do, then they'll raise taxes.

Most of the public, for good reason, gets tired of the waste that gov't buerocracies practice. They won't raise taxes until it's proven to them that waste has been controlled.

A case in point, for me anyway, a few years ago there was a push to upgrade the local sheriff dept. The sheriff at the time whipped up the public into a frenzy over a couple of high school students they found who had pot in their lockers. While I don't condone having drugs.....anywhere, it was portrayed as a "serious drug problem" in our school system.

Now, instead of suspending these two students (or better yet, throwing them out of school for about 6 months), the local sherrif's dept decided they needed helicopters to oversee where this pot came from while in the air. Big budget increase (to the tune of millions of dollars) were spent to buy and maintain these helicopters. Of course, no big pot fields were found in what amounts to a sleepy suburban community and the helicopters were eventually used to fly overhead during 4th of July Memorial Day and Labor Day parades.

You can see where this story is going, but now budgets must be addressed. The "helicopter" sherrif was voted out of office for his "gestapo" type tactics in setting up "road blocks" to catch DUI/DWI offenders to make money to fuel these helicopters (btw...his success rate was less than 1/10th of 1% catching DUI/DWI offenders using road blocks). Now, the newly elected sherrif is asking for more funds. I don't drink, BTW and I certainly don't do drugs.

The public told him to sell the helicopters......no more funds....matter of fact, he has to cut staff to meet his budget. Of course, the outcry from the sherrif's dept was that there would be chaos ensuing with a cut in staff (guess they won't be able to catch as many speeders with fewer speed trap troopers). No chaos ensued, as predicted. But the public took a bath on selling those helicopters.

 

She doesn't know how to user her detector then. She probally mounts up up, sets her cruise (or plants her foot) and waits for it to beep, before she slows down. In my opinion, she deserves every ticket she gets.

Knowing how to use the radar detector is the main thing. My detector accounts for less than 25% of my advanced knowledge of upcomming speed traps. Knowing when, where, to speed up, slow down, etc etc is paramount, for a professional speeder. Any speeder who mindless sets their cruise, and uses a detector has an expensive waste of money on their dash.

To give you a better example, my wife has moved to a neighbouring city to complete her masters degree. I drive a round trip to pick her up every friday, and drop her off every sunday. It is a divided highway (2 lanes in each direction, separated by a grass median) with a speedlimit of 110 KPH, with a 1 way distance of about 250km. On a single round trip, I usually encounter atleast 2 instant on radar or infrequently, a stationary ladar trap. In the 7000 km's I have driven since september, I have been surprised (no advanced knowledge of any speed trap. Just full on, on the detector as I passed.) by instant on radar exactly once. However, it was getting dark out, and I was only going 15 over the limit, so the officer must have decided it wasn't worth his time to pull me over.