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Originally Posted by isaac
It is what's stupid about society. The reason is we take these blanket assumptions, turn them into laws to protect everybody from a dangerous few, and empower cops to legally interpret the difference.
That system of "police discretion" makes us believe we won't be ticketed every time we get pulled over, depending on the situation and the real safety hazards inherent to it.
The only problem is that we've already set up a system where the police essentially fund themselves by ticketing otherwise safe people by following the letter of the law rather than using their own discretion to identify what's truly safe after the fact when they pull the person over. There's little guarantee that the cop who pulls you over will truly understand the safety issues of the situation without his judgment being clouded by emotion or the need to bolster department funding with another several hundred dollar fine from you, even if you were "breaking the law" in a totally innocuous manner.
So you have so many riders/drivers so inured of the police's poor judgment and financially justified motivations that they fear having to be subjected to it, and therefore they run. If the system weren't already set up to be governed entirely by people with notoriously erratic judgment, this wouldn't be an issue.
Yeah but most traffic rules are enacted because one idiot out of 1,000 fucked up and crashed, therefore putting the city in fear of being sued for having unsafe road conditions, and so they oversimplify things by adding yet another overzealous law to keep the one idiot from fucking up, crashing, and suing the city.
That's why you'll see a new traffic light where there wasn't one before, in an area that's not growing. Or you'll see a "no U-turns" sign suddenly in an otherwise very safe, wide open area, where there obviously needn't be one.
It's because that 1 out of 1,000 people fucked up and crashed due to their incompetence, but they wanted to blame the city, and so the city gets scared and makes yet another rule for EVERYBODY, despite 999 out of 1,000 people being able to negotiate the intersection/curve/stop sign/railroad crossing just fine. The only difference is that now if those 999 other people do the same thing they did the day before, it's illegal, and they owe hundreds of dollars.
I've worked with numerous city councils and city management staffs with issues like this, and that's how that really works. It's amazing how the fear-driven whims of a city/county council/commission can turn an otherwise safe driving maneuver from safe and legal to safe but illegal overnight.
I've been present at city discussions where traffic engineers persuade the council that if they lower the speed limit on a road from 45mph to 35mph, more total cars will be able to flow through that street during rush hour. That speed limit is then lowered for the purpose of improving traffic flow, with safety not being a factor at all. Yet when a cop pulls you over for doing your customary 50mph in that road the day after the speed limit changes, he's cussing his brains out at you about how you were driving like a maniac on account of the new 15mph differential between your vehicle and the number on the sign.
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But that is the problem. It isn't a 1/1000 thing with wheelies. I do understand and completely agree and sympathize with you that many laws, especially local ones, are made because of an overreaction due to fear. We're talking about being able to wheelie on a public road, though, and a majority of the kids doing this today
do present some kind of danger to both himself and others.
(to change the topic for a sec)
Also, when a cop pulls you over for going 50 in a 35 that was 45 a day before, it's still your fault. There have been studies done (and please don't ask me where to find them. I'll look if you desperately need them, though) that said that it is actually more dangerous for someone to be going 60mph in a 75mph zone than 80. What they found was that it wasn't speeding causing the problem, it was the
difference in speed. So, if you want to look at it that way, the cop didn't pull you over for going 50 because you were speeding; the cop pulled you over for being much faster than the other traffic. So even though it was safe to go 50 yesterday, it isn't today, because of the
difference in speed.
also
Quote:
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Originally Posted by tarosean
Damn has Dealsgapdragon rubbed off on someone????
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EDIT: Sounds like everyone is kind of winding down in this discussion. Pretty much what we can take from all this is:
Sport bike riders are pretty much bad-ass awesome.