How Car Insurance Just Inadvertently Provided a Revolutionary New Way to Fight Speeding Tickets
Have you ever gotten a ticket for speeding and knew that you weren’t going as fast as the officer said you were?
The total number of people who receive speeding tickets is 41,000,000 a year with an average cost of $152.00 each. That is 1 in every 5 licensed drivers in the US.The total number of speeding tickets paid each year $6,232,000,000.
Police and judges are completely dependent upon ‘catching’ people speeding. They need you to speed in order to make their salaries. This gives them a positive incentive to keep this revenue stream going which can lead to less than ethical means to collecting revenue.
Sure, driving excessively fast can be a hazard on the road, but how many of these tickets issued are actually legitimate.
In April the Free Thought Project reported a story out of McKinney, TX where officers knew their radar guns were reporting significantly higher speeds than drivers were actually driving.
Their solution? No need to fix the equipment, just keep writing tickets.
Radar guns malfunction all the time. Regular maintenance must be properly conducted in order for the devices clock the driver’s precise speed.
But what about Laser guns, LiDAR? Those are 100% accurate, right? Wrong.
In 2005 a BBC program Inside Out demonstrated how the LiDAR speed gun most commonly used in the UK, the LTI 20.20 could create exaggerated readings.
A retired Sergeant, who used to be part of this racket explains speeding tickets as such, “’Indiscriminate revenue gathering’ It is absolutely disgusting. The government and the Police Force need to hang their heads in shame.”
The retired officer’s number one reason for why you should dispute all traffic tickets, is that often the charges are incorrect or the evidence is illegally or incorrectly gathered.
Knowing that police collect these billions through incorrect, fallacious, and often illegal practices, it has still been hard to beat these tickets. Until now.
Insurance companies have come up with a novel way to lower driver premiums by installing monitors in the vehicles of their customers.
These devices track the time of day you drive, your mileage, and your acceleration and braking rates, as well as precise speed. The better you drive, the lower your premium.
An unintended use for this technology is proving your innocence when you’ve been wrongfully accused of speeding.
In Broward County, Florida a driver is using his device in this very way.
Mike Skversky said a Broward sheriff’s deputy pulled him over in early October and accused him of speeding.
The officer said he was going 58 mph in a 50 mph zone, but Skversky knew that he wasn’t, and he had proof.
Skversky had Allstate’s version of the driving monitor installed called “Drivewise.” He downloaded the data from this device to verify his speed and confirmed that he was only driving 47.8 mph at the exact time his speeding ticket was issued.
This is one of the very first times in revenue generating history that drivers will actually have real proof of their own speeds.
“I think it’s a great defense,” Ted Hollander, attorney for Skversky, told Local 10 News. “Ordinarily, a person doesn’t have any real evidence to say they weren’t speeding, but now they have something.”
Obviously these devices must be proven to be accurate before they can be widely accepted as a evidence but the implications thus far are promising to say the least.
Skversky said he believes they are at least as accurate as the sheriff’s own radars.
“This is pretty much bulletproof evidence,” he said. “How can you disagree with the computer?”