It’s never very clear in the US if the speed limit is locally a thing, a suggestion, or completely ignored. As a visitor, it’s always problematic. I wish they got that sorted out.
Yeah, I live in small-town US where many residents have complained about speeding in areas with heavy pedestrian use. In response, the local PD was quoted on the front page of the paper saying they don’t have time to enforce speed limits. A few years later and they were again on the front page saying that they don’t have time or equipment to enforce parking regulations. So here they’re somewhere between suggestion and completely ignored, but the next town over is filled with speed cameras and highway patrol sitting in wait to meet their quota…both towns on the same road.
Oh no! The police aren’t busy with more serious laws so they focus on the only laws people are breaking at the moment!
Why does this mean they suck, exactly? If you want to drive fast, drive on roads designed for fast driving.
I mean you could just follow the limit. Just saying.
The safest speed to go is the speed of traffic. If the limit is 55 and you are driving 52 but everyone else is driving 62, you are the most dangerous person on the road.
No sympathy to drivers of objectively environmentally worse modes of transportation unwilling to follow traffic laws.
The town had 250 people and 50 police officers.
Jfc 😅
half of the department’s 50 officers “had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs,” the station said, citing personnel records obtain under a Freedom of Information request.
The shocking part is where it says that’s only 5X the cops for a town that size. Wtf? One or two should suffice in a town that small. We have a town here with just over a thousand, and they have no city cops at all.
10 cops means 1-2 on shift at a time, once you figure in days off, needing people working 24 hours a day, a leadership position or two, and people out sick/vacation, 10 people isn’t as many as it sounds.
However, even 10 is a huge amount for a town of 250. I think most towns of 1-2k people generally don’t have a department and usually rely on county police.
I lived in a town like this (USA). We had no cops and the fire department was volunteer only. I recall a house burning down to the cement foundation over a couple hours, fire dept came by to put out the ruins. No one was hurt.
Can’t imagine having 2 cops in that town, let alone 50. No money.
The post office used to be in the same building as the bank (until the bank burnt down). They moved into the lower floor of a house.
Yeah, I had a town of 15k and 5 miles up the road we had one around 300. They just contracted ours out. 300 peoples’ taxes is not a lot, why waste it on police who will what, catch that one kid every once in a while, or have to throw a drunk out of the only bar? Not worth it.
typical amount of police in countries vary between 0.1-0.7% of the population with most having around 0.2-0.4%
Read the article. It explains the scam and why it got shut down.
I read the article. How do you think I got that information that was in the article? I understand what was going on. What I don’t understand is the average town of that size even needing 10. How about some reading comprehension, smart guy?
POOP?
Username checks out.
I thought piefed people were required to be nice?
They still have to pay or show up in court, though.
That’s a huge part of why some of these towns stay afloat. Your ticket is revenue for their population 12 town. It’s for sure a racket. I still remember the $500 ticket I got in Beaver, Utah for going 10 over…
Brookville Indiana.
Got busted drinking a beer while canoeing. While doing my community service, the locals told us the bend in the river with the guy drinking at a picnic table was actually a cop. He cheers every boat going down the river and if you cheers back, he radios you description down river to his buddies and they pull you out of the river.
There was another group in our “substance abuse class” that said they were camping and lit a joint around the camp fire and the local police came out of the woods in tactical gear and night vision goggles to cite them.
Fuck that place
It’s legalized banditry.
$500 for beaver sounds expensive.
Depends on the beaver
Catoosa, OK used to be infamous in the late 1990’s. It’s on Rt 66, and back then thry would stop you for any reason they could make up. It became a large enough problem that businesses started to leave, because neither customers nor employees wamted to risk driving there.
Something happened around the mid 2000’s, and the police became lesa crazy. Since then the town has exploded in size.
Sounds more like a problem with how they’ve structured their taxes if they NEED to fine people…
Why do you want to defend cops fucking people over?
$500 for a ticket is wild. I think the worst I have gotten (when I first started driving 30 years ago) was like $200, and that was 25 over.
And big town cops… and medium town cops. Goddammit cops, ruining towns for everyone!
“You cops sure are a contentious people.”
Small towns want every scrap of income they can get and tickets are part of it. There’s also a motivated synergy there between cop and a small town with no other crime really happening because it justifies the small town even having a cop on payroll.
Yup, they deliberately setup drops in speed limits for the sole purpose of catching out of towners
God I started a new long distance deive for work recently and its half on a rural highway. Like 10 tiny towns over arpund 60 miles.
Every one…
Outside speed limit is 55 mph
Hit town, 45 mph
30 feet later, 35 mph
2 blocks in the middle, 30 mph
Back to 35 mph
35 mph feels like it lasts riiiiiight up to the edge of the town.
And half the time the first drop going in and the 55mph sign going out are obscured by overgrown trees.
Its just designed to catch people traveling the corridor.
Are there any actual dwellings around the road? If so, those speed limits are quite reasonable or even on the high end. In Europe it is 50 km/h (30 mph) if there are houses around a road, and 30 km/h (18 mph) for actual town streets. The streets are also specifically designed to be narrower and there are a lot of traffic calming measures to make drivers naturally want to drive the speed limit. This way it is safe & pleasant for townsfolk to cross the street, the town doesn’t end up split in two by the highway, and if you’re a sane driver you won’t get fined even if you accidentally miss a speed limit sign.
Perhaps the best solution is to make the highways go around towns completely to avoid all of this. (and then we can also work towards banning cars in populated areas)
That gradual reduction in speed is typical for roads passing through rural towns in the US. There is often a 25mph for the town center too (or at least the most dense portion of the road as it passes through the town). These are typically rural roads, not the main highways/interstates that do this. They are usually low traffic roads where building a bypass would not be economical.
Motorists don’t like them because they have to slow down for a few minutes. Which is the greatest evil imaginable. The only reason for a lower speed limit is to scam the motorist. The ~8000 pedestrians and bicyclists that are killed each year on the roads is a small price to pay for being able to go fast through someone’s neighborhood.
I’m the asshole who will drive 4 hours just to make the cop show up to court over it.
My state doesn’t have absolute speed limits, so if you can show that the speed was safe for the road conditions, you can get off.
Or just get a paralegal to file discovery paperwork. It usually costs the city more to do that than the ticket is worth, so they’ll drop it.
It feels like paying racist assholes is counter productive. Especially when you have to pay settlements.
Most settlements are paid by insurance companies. And in small towns the judge and cops are likely friends, if not related.
Tickets don’t go to taxes…? Just directly to the local police?
He left the part about small towns being mostly conservative and politically uneducated.
When no one wants to pay taxes…
Here in Minnesota we have several “Speed Trap Towns” along country roads and highways with 50+ mph speed limits where suddenly the speed limit drops to 30 and there’s a cop hiding behind the bush.
Yep. Wisconsin too. Learned very quickly that cruise control set to 1 mph under the limit is the way. There’s quite a few towns on the way out to Taylors Falls that pretty much always have a cop sitting in the same spot just waiting for out-of-towners, and it’s remarkable how successful they are.
Wow, that is amazing to hear. While I don’t want to be pulled over, in the southern US I’ve never been pulled over doing 10% over the posted limit. My wife on the other hand, calls me a slow old man as she goes whatever she thinks feels right.
There will be a brief moment of satisfaction when these types all lose their jobs to drones before things get even more dystopian
So Flock cams.
