[freehunter]

>And when I’m late, I speed.

How the poor are treated in our country is a crime, yes, but if you can't afford a speeding ticket, you can avoid getting a speeding ticket by not speeding. Going faster than the speed limit doesn't really get you there appreciably faster, but it does increase your chances of being in an accident substantially and greatly increases your chances of getting a speeding ticket.

Stealing food to support your family is one thing. That literally means you can eat that night. Speeding is completely avoidable. It doesn't mean a corrupt officer won't still pull you over for something, but it surely would reduce the odds that they would look your way.

[ChuckMcM]

Technically true, there is an interesting book you might want to read titled, "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" (http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much/dp/0...). Its central theme is that scarcity changes the value calculus of our decision making process, and it isn't just about money, it can be making poor choices when you don't think you have enough time for example.

In order to choose not to speed, once speeding is inevitable because of a lack of time, the woman in the article has to accept the consequence of being late (forced) or the consequence of getting a ticket (probabilistic), and she (and most people) choose the risk choice rather than the 'forced' choice. The correct answer is to wind that transaction back to what she was doing before she was late, and finding the places where she ended up with not enough time, and those are then filled with a series of what appear to be inconsequential choices with respect to time vs time availability.

I found it a fascinating read, and it gave me quite a different perspective on problems like these where the 'obvious' answer seems to be "if it hurts, then stop doing that."

[thaumaturgy]

I've not read that book, but there's another factor common in poverty, especially among those living in poverty who are trying to get out of it: extreme stress.

Working your way out of poverty demands superhuman levels of energy and willpower. You have to juggle multiple jobs, each with their own schedule and you have to be able to float through crises. The plumbing failed in your run-down apartment again? Well, it's not like you can call in sick today, you don't have the kind of job that affords you the luxury of taking time off.

When you have kids, it's even more severe. Kids need things all the time: food, school supplies, clothes, attention. They get sick. They need to be supervised at all times.

So you got off work late and you're trying to pick up your kids, who've been waiting at school for 20 minutes already, and you're still hoping to make it to the first half of your class so that you can get the education you need that might help you get out of this whole cycle. You know that eventually a school official is going to complain about leaving your kids outside. What do they care? Your kids aren't their problem. You've already dealt with people from the school before, you don't need another problem with them.

Every minute counts. But now you're stuck at a red light and you know how this cycle works. You drive it every day. If you hit this light while it's red and the next light is green, you'll be stuck at a red light in every single intersection between here and the school.

If only.

If only you had left 30 seconds earlier, you could've avoided the red lights.

If only you had driven just a little faster, you could've avoided the red lights.

If only you had pulled out ahead of that slow senior sedan, you might've avoided the red lights.

While you're sitting there, at the red light, staring at an empty intersection because this light is on a timer and there's no cross traffic, the seconds tick by like minutes.

Your kids are waiting, still.

And you're afraid, too. What if the school official wants to reprimand you? What if they want to argue? You don't have the time. What if that creepy kid is hanging out with your kids right now? Drugs are everywhere, it's hard to keep them away. What if a patrol car drove by and noticed your kids standing outside?

What if, what if, what if. Every second.

--

It's a piece of cake to sit back and analyze this situation from afar: yeah, sure, speeding only saves you 10 seconds on average in a small town. Maybe a minute here or there depending on where you are. It's not worth the safety risk to yourself or others. It's not worth the ticket.

But I don't believe anyone is completely immune to sacrificing their principles or reason in all situations. Live a stressful enough life where every minute counts, and you too will start trading the risk of a traffic ticket for the reward of one extra minute.

[brudgers]

before she was late

For a poor single mother holding a job with few or no benefits and with a support network often consisting of people in worse circumstances, that time may have been back in the heady days of 2005 or 2006.

One might say, some people are born into lateness.

[ChuckMcM]

I disagree. I have some of the same issues as the single mom profiled here, and reading the book helped me connect the dots. Having less of something than is required to meet all of the requirements for that something (the definition of scarcity) triggers this behavior in people. And if you don't actually stop and think about what is happening, you start making choices which are counter productive to your situation.

If you've read the Seven Habits of Highly Successful people one of their points is to invest time to work on 'important' but not 'urgent' things. They argue that by doing so these things do not contribute to 'urgency' later by becoming a crisis. They back into the same, rather powerful concept. Which is that if you don't take time to externalize all the 'costs' you don't effectively manage the resource. In my case I would get a free hour of time and think I could do "anything" with it, but once I started keeping track of things I had put off in my notebook I started recognizing where I'd spend that hour doing something unrelated to the stuff being put off and later that activity was going to be 'urgent' if it didn't get done. By choosing instead to put that hour toward one of my projects needing time I keep them under the crisis threshold. I also recognized things I really wasn't ever going to get to and got rid of those projects entirely from my 'queue.'

It can be challenging to realize that you can only do one thing tonight even though three things are vying for your attention, and pulling an all-nighter (my go to trick for college) really taints the hours you spend on projects the next day, which then take more time than they would have, which means even more things vying for your attention. You have to 'back up' to before that point where you are over loaded and understand what you can really get done in that time and then prioritize based on overall progress against the goals. Relatively easy to say, really hard to do.

[brudgers]

From the article, the primary risk factor for being pulled over isn't speeding, it is simply choosing to drive. People are traffic stopped based on an expected stream of revenue.

Better to violation mine a person driving an old beater full of kids than a salesperson in a late model on their way to a sales call. The poor person is more likely to rack up insurance, license, and registration violations. And they are more likely to show up in court without an attorney to negotiate fines down.

As mentioned in the article, a poor person driving slow must mean they have something to hide. Understandable though it is, the mistake is to imagine this is anything other than a retail business. The police officers are writing violations in order to fund their paychecks. The judges and prosecutors are imposing fines for the same reason.

Flipping the light from yellow to red when cars are in the middle of an intersection isn't law enforcement.

[crazypyro]

Did you read the article? It's much more than just complaining about speeding tickets... Speeding tickets and other small, petty tickets are turning into weeks in jail and thousands in fines, mostly for poor blacks, because of ridiculous city zoning and fragmented court systems.

[freehunter]

Yes, I obviously read it since I said "the way they're treated is criminal" and also quoted the article itself. The million little cuts is terrible. But one of the little cuts, which the article makes out to be a very common one, is easily avoided. Don't shrug it off with a "I have a lead foot, it's no big deal". It obviously is a big deal because it's leading to people going to prison. How many people would never find themselves in this horrible spiral if they just obeyed the speed limit?

I was driving on the Illinois tollway over the weekend, which is under construction and at a 45mph speed limit. I was in a hurry to meet a client, but I'm at a point in my life where I can't afford the $375 ticket for speeding in a construction zone. So, with people flying around me at 70mph, I set my cruise control to 45.

Because the $375 ticket would cripple me financially right now. It's not a hard concept.

[crazypyro]

Right, but that literally has nothing to do with the article. People are also getting tickets for things like not having proof of insurance and expired registrations. Furthermore, the system is set up in such a way of encouraging the police to use predatory tactics to produce revenue. This includes giving tickets for things that most other departments consider not being worth enforcing by tickets. Boiling down the argument to "Don't speed if you can't afford" it adds nothing to conversation and completely misses the point of the article.

[freehunter]

No, the point of the article is people going to jail over minor offenses that snowball into major jail time. And one minor offense they call out repeatedly is speeding. Speeding is the beginning of the record for numerous people cited throughout the article.

It's a controllable factor which costs literally nothing, unlike registration and insurance. So why does speeding claim so many?

[crazypyro]

Speeding claims so many because the extraneous police departments in STL. Furthermore, poor are being targeted by speeding tickets at an even higher rate than average because police expect to get more ticket possibilities. The bottom line is police departments need to get revenue to sustain themselves and instead of looking elsewhere, they are using predatory tactics that disproportionately hurt the poor.

You arguing in a similar way to the people that say if Mike Brown didn't want to get shot, he shouldn't have been walking down the middle of the street. The problem is that all of those poor people getting tickets at a higher rate is symbolic of a larger, societal problem (poverty), in much the same way that Mike Brown's death was symbolic of racism (and also poverty too, of course).

[wehadfun]

>So why does speeding claim so many?

You probably think it is because poor people speed more than non-poor people. I would guess that all of us technically speed as soon as we pull out of our drive way. The difference is these places have cops enforcing speeding laws more rigidly

[basseq]

"... poor are being targeted by speeding tickets at an even higher rate than average because police expect to get more ticket possibilities"

Can someone explain this? Are the poor really being targeted? Why are there more ticket possibilities? (Because you could get someone for expired registration, too?)

Is this a correlation ≠ causation thing? (I.e., police are more likely to pull over a speeder with multiple violations? That doesn't mean you're targeting the poor.)

[crazypyro]

Older, more beatup cars tend to have higher "value" for the police officer. Someone driving a brand new Audi isn't going to have the same potential ticketing "value" as a 20 year old rusty car with a beat up bumper, as an example.

[mindslight]

By not "speeding", you're violating the de facto rules of the road in most places.

In order for your stance to make sense in the universal moral sense, people must respect the law. In order for people to respect the law, the law must conform to normative behavior. Bureaucrats who invert this causality and work to dictate people's common behavior (whether it's 10mph too-low speed limits, drug persecution, or even something a-posteri-innocuous like the MA seatbelt law) are ultimately responsible for destroying this respect and creating a society where everybody is guilty but only selectively prosecuted.

[seanflyon]

The problem is that it is not possible to drive (or do much of anything) without breaking the law. There are more laws than any single person has ever read and ignorance is not excuse.

[freehunter]

That is a problem, yes, but I didn't see anything in the article citing obscure laws that no one knows about. The closest I saw was not subscribing to the only approved trash service.

[mikeash]

It's a bit inverted, but a good chunk of the article centered on the common misconception that if you show up to court for a ticket and can't pay the fine, you'll go to jail. This is causing a lot of people to fail to appear in court, getting them in much more trouble than they were originally.

[mikeash]

My general guideline for comment threads is that when somebody starts pulling out individual sentences by themselves to quote and then argue with them, they're no longer contributing and can be ignored.

I didn't think it would apply to articles too, but here we are.

The article goes over a huge number of factors and details about life in this area. Why did you think this one piece was worth pulling out and making an obvious comment on? "If you can't afford a ticket, don't speed." Well duh. Who are you talking to? That woman isn't reading your comment, and I'm sure she already knows what you're trying to tell her anyway.

[freehunter]

A couple of those fines were for speeding

That was Bolden’s second arrest. In 2009 she was arrested in the town of Bel-Ridge for a warrant on a speeding ticket.

The Foristell warrant stemmed from a speeding ticket in 2011

“These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding

Both were speeding tickets that he had neglected to pay.

a warrant stemming from a 20-year-old speeding ticket.

Speed seems to be a major factor throughout the entire article. Would removing the one thing solve the problem? No. Would it help some people? Undoubtedly.

It's not picking out one sentence. It's picking out one thing that the article said over and over again is a major factor in people going to jail over minor offenses.

[mturmon]

What I notice is that you have not only isolated on one very circumscribed part of the article, but you have also chosen to blame the people getting tickets for infractions that have little to do with traffic safety.

You have therefore missed the point of the article.

I frequently observe this kind of "rational" skepticism in analytical people who are studiously avoiding something uncomfortable.

[freehunter]

It's well known that speeding decreases your travel time linearly but increases your braking distance by far more than that. Generally if you double your speed, you quadruple your braking distance but only half your arrival time.

So no, it's not "rational" skepticism to avoid something uncomfortable, and yes, it has everything to do with traffic safety. Maybe you missed the part of the article where the person prone to speeding tickets got arrested following an accident? It didn't say she was speeding at the time, but speeding doesn't help avoid an accident at all.

[mturmon]

I observe that you'd rather discuss speeding than racism.

The tendency to divert uncomfortable conversations about race is one of the reasons our nation has arrived at this point. It has become a coping mechanism for us.

[mikeash]

Impressive! Not only did you place blame on the victims in general for this whole situation, but you've now managed to blame the victim for a specific incident which is clearly described as being another person's fault. That takes some real effort.

[mikeash]

I'm referring specifically to the act of quoting and responding to a single sentence. The representativeness of that sentence doesn't come into it. I'm not saying the act itself is inherently wrong, I'm saying that in my experience it's a reliable indicator that someone is no longer saying anything useful.

Again, who are you talking to? These people aren't reading your comment. You wouldn't be telling them anything new anyway. They already know that they shouldn't break traffic rules if they can't afford the fines. I'm certain it's not a problem with lack of knowledge in that area. None of us are under any illusions that it's OK to speed if you can't pay the ticket. So what's the point of saying what you said? All I can come up with is that it makes you feel superior.

[freehunter]

Who is any of us talking to? There are many comments here on this very thread that are talking to no one (including the top voted one about Finland. We don't make the traffic laws, who cares what Finland does?).

The point of Internet forums is to have a discussion. It would appear we are having a discussion. ChuckMcM even linked me to an interesting-looking book. That's the point of Internet forums.

[mikeash]

My point is your comment doesn't make any sense when directed at this community either. It's just a pointless statement of obviousness, phrased to communicate maximum superiority.

[freehunter]

I actually have a reliable indicator as to a comment's value as well. If the person says they have a reliable indicator of a comment's value and use that to dismiss anything the person says (yet still finds the need to post a comment in response), in my experience that's a reliable indicator that the person is no longer saying anything useful and just wants to increase their post count, usually so the account has value when they sell it to a marketing company.

So what's the point in commenting if you don't think my post has any value? All I can come up with is that it makes you feel superior.