Traffic violation penalties’ value questionable

The Writing on the Wall

Unless they come from a long, illustrious line of highway patrolmen, no one grows up wanting to be a traffic cop. Plenty of young people wish for the day they become police officers, but you will be hard-pressed to find a child daydreaming in elementary school about writing speeding tickets for a living.

I fail to understand why this does not carry over into adulthood. There is no excuse for anyone with a driver’s license to want to work as a traffic cop — any more than there should be any student with a parking pass to want to work for parking services. These modern-day Vichy French turn their backs on their fellow drivers to dance with the devil against them.

In doing so, it becomes clear that traffic cops are the most useless of government employees, surpassed in futility only by White House interns and Ted Kennedy. We should be thankful that crime rates are low enough that these men and women in uniform are free to sit in Crown Victorias eating doughnuts and telling dirty jokes. Yet we keep them employed with our tax dollars to fight against us instead. They do so by enforcing some of the most invalid laws on the books — even for Virginia.

It is common knowledge that most roads in America, particularly interstates, can safely be operated in good weather conditions by anyone with enough mental and physical capacity to have a driver’s license at approximately 10 to 15 miles over the posted limit. A simple five-minute drive on your nearest expressway will prove the point.

As a society, we have decided that a posted speed limit of 65 mph means we can, and are even obligated to, cruise at 75 mph or more. Over time, these obligations have evolved into unwritten laws. To travel at 65 mph in a 65 mph zone is downright dangerous. Such drivers are a traveling roadblock — a speed bump with wheels — to the rest of us.

Yet, as we obey these societal laws, we must live in constant fear of the societal law enforcement, who dispense an estimated 14 million speeding tickets every year. Because the speed limits are not reflective of the literal speed limit on a road, the U.S. government has successfully turned more than three-quarters of their licensed drivers into convicted criminals.

Only the most naïve believe the published reason that speed limits are for our safety. Anyone with a little common sense and a healthy dose of cynicism will quickly realize that, like most things in this world, speed limits are a money game.

Take, for convenient example, the "speed trap," concocted by the devil in the depths of hell to inflict pain and suffering on pastors and old women. When cops sit for hours on the highway, slowly getting testicular cancer from their radar guns while simultaneously ruining countless Americans’ days, the government inevitably begins to rely heavily on speeding tickets as a source of arguably unconstitutional revenue. Speeding tickets, an excellent 21st century example of taxation without representation, have become integral to the functioning of local and state governments, to the point where officers are quietly given quotas of traffic violations to fill per month.

In a perfect world, speed limits on a road would actually reflect the speed limits of the road, we would be allowed travel at the speeds we know we should, and cops would only harass those that are actually driving dangerously. But we live in a less than perfect world, one in which a government by the people and for the people enforces unacceptable laws which turn a marked majority of the population into criminals, in order to make bank at our expense. Our "representative" government needs to start representing.

Brian Goodman is a sophomore history/SCOM major.