last traffic ticket !

L

lqhikers

Senior Member
Joined
May 18, 2007
Messages
594
Location
la quinta calif
was going through some old pictures and ran across a picture of
a car i owned in 1972 (a Lotus Europa) lived in Rescue ca,near Sacramento Ca.
was driving to work on twisty green valley road and got a ticket for crossing a double
line on a inside curve,a corner you could see around.
being some what young i felt it was a safe move so went to court.

saw the judge,Folsom Ca. he asked about the car i was driving and said i should
take him to see the spot ticket was written,turned out he wanted a ride in the Lotus! :D
ticket dismissed.

that was 43 years ago and have not had a ticket since.

anybody out their longer with out a ticket?

Les,lqhikers
 
Les, I'll think of you when we drive down Green Valley Road tomorrow. You must have been down close to Folsom in the Sacramento County section. :)
 
I never had one in my life until a few years ago, but that wasn't 43 years (but close) and mine was bogus and the officer out right lied on the stand and I wasn't quick enough to catch him in it. I still regret not appealing it to this day.
 
I went from 1966 (speeding in Brookings, Oregon) until last year when I got a citation for using a cell phone. BTW, I now have hands free devices.
 
ski3pin.

when you drive up green valley road we lived at the end of Ulenkamp rd.
and i think green valley rd has been rebuilt since 72,have not been back for
over 20 years.
Les,lqhikers
 
My last ticket was about 25 years ago. I got caught early in the morning in a speed trap in Fallon, Nevada. The 25mph zone goes forever. I thought it had finally changed. I was almost to the Churchill County Fairgrounds and was pulled over. City policeman asked if I knew how fast I was going. I said 33, just under the speed limit, and pointed at the sign just down the road that said 35. He said it was 25 and right at that sign was the change. I mentioned I was an out of state invited presenter at the large community event all weekend at the fairgrounds. That didn't help. I got a $40 fee notice in the mail, please send cashiers check only. The ticket never showed up on my record.

lqhikers said:
ski3pin.

when you drive up green valley road we lived at the end of Ulinkamp rd.
and i think green valley rd has been rebuilt since 72,have not been back for
over 20 years.
Les,lqhikers
Click to expand...
Les, can't find any mention of your road. Downtown Rescue is pretty much the same with the Rescue Store on the south side of the road and the little park on the north side. Everything else has changed dramatically. Lower parts of Green Valley Road have been rebuilt.
 
My one and only speeding ticket was about 25 years ago.
During one of our "car" events here in Monterey.
I was in my Shelby GT 350 (bright red with white racing strips) hard to miss.
It was night,I had stopped at the light before entering the tunnel going to Pacific Grove.
When the light changed I eased out in 1st and saw that I was all alone on the road.
I wound it up to about 55 in 1st shifted to 2nd hit about 85 and as I went into 3rd I noticed
flashing lights at the entrance end of the tunnel. Knew it was a cop so just pulled over and coasted to a stop.
When the officer came to the window and asked "...how fast were you going?" he said he couldn't time me that I had pulled away so fast he couldn't catch me.
I just sat there grinned a bit,gave my info and he gave me a ticket for 40 in a 35 zone.

I said thank you and drove away ,a lot slower this time.

In the 48 years I have owned that car I only "earned" one ticket but have been stopped many times where i could have gotten one
but the officer just wanted to look at the car and talk car stuff.

I try real hard these days to stay within the limit.
Frank
 
Not my story, one from my brother a couple of years ago, his last ticket. He is into cars and has a yard full of them. He was driving one of his kit cars, Shelby Cobra thing. He was driving a two lane country road on his way home. Speed limit was 55, there were a few vehicles backed up behind a slow truck. Although there was opportunity, no one was pulling out to pass. At a nice long stretch my brother did, and did it very quickly, and disappeared out of sight. After slowing down further down the road, a State Patrol unit showed up behind with lights on and pulled him over. The older officer was very mad.
"I clocked you at 138 miles per hour! What makes you think you can handle a vehicle at that speed?"
In his straight forward, dry manner, my brother politely asked, "Sir, what makes you think you can handle a vehicle at that speed?"
The officer's anger rose, "I've been trained at the academy to handle vehicles at very high speeds!"
"Was that at the old ------------------ track?" my brother asked, "Before it was moved to the new place?"
"Yes. What do you know about that?" the officer was now puzzled.
"I was your high speed instructor," my brother answered.
The usual conversation followed but the officer ended with, "For 138, you know I have you write you some kind of ticket."
"What can you do for me?" my brother asked.
A few weeks later he happily paid his fine for 75 in a 55 zone.
 
Nice one.It must be our kind of luck with the cars we drive.The officer knows he has to give you something but is maybe a "car" guy and understands.
Like your brother I have had similar stops.
That was than ,now I am a good boy.

Times have changed so much that a stop like related above would mean the loss of car and drivers license.
Just can't do that now.
Thanks for the story.
Frank
 
Les, we live just up Hwy 49 north of Rescue. If I had a Lotus, I would have been pushing those turns too.

Around here we have very little traffic control, so I've gone decades without a traffic ticket. I think the last speeding tix I got was on I-15 in a Celica south of Salt Lake City. Guy was using radar and got me and a trucker, a two-fer and made us both get in his cruiser to write us up. The trucker was upset and said he had just been popped a hundred miles back. The trooper just smiled and said he ought to slow down. I was 21 years old and paid my debt to society for going over the speed limit.

Since we're on the subject, I thought I would tell a quick story about being let off without a ticket. I was living in Ocean Beach in 1980, house sitting an older home, and the house across the street was occupied by three young women. One of them had a funky Datsun 2000 and one day I helped her hotwire the thing to start it. Soon enough I bought from her for $250 as an alternate to my flatbed work truck.

The roadster had been butchered. It had Cadillac tail lights which had been fiberglassed on the back, if you can picture it. The roof had a piece of tempered glass ,which I prompted ripped off to become a convertible. I pulled hundreds of feet of miscellaneous after market wiring from under the dash. The car was fast with a two litre engine and a four speed, which was the precrusor to the 240Z I would come home from work and park my truck, throw my surfboard onto the passenger seat and cruise Sunset Cliffs.
One night I was out in my little surf rig, running down Mt. Soledad Road, clearly exceeding the 50mpg speed limit. A traffic light ahead went yellow, and I punched it instead of stopping, catching a red as I cleared the intersection. As I came down the hill to Mission Blvd. a San Diego cop pulled in behind me with lights ablaze. I gracefully pulled over without making a fuss. After handing over my DL and insurance, the conversation went thusly:

Cop: Do you know how fast you were going:
Me: Well, the speedo cable is broken, so I really don't know.
Cop: You went through a red light back there. Why did't you stop?
Me: Well, the brakes don't work very well, so I couldn't really stop.
Cop: {Takes a long look at the funky rig, and my young, fairly innocent face, glistening with a light sweat}.
Cop: Well, I don't know the name of the street where you went through the red light; and I don't want to drive back up there. So, I'll tell you what. Why don't you go home and get off the road?
Me: Yes, Sir!

Epilogue: I moved to Pacific Beach (aka P:cool:, and parked the Datsun out front. My roommates got tired of looking at the no longer running car and pushed it around the corner where it languished. A month later I noticed someone had ripped off the carburetor. Later that summer, someone else left a note on the car, offering to buy it. I sold the car for the same $250 I paid for it. The buyers planned to strip and restore the car, so hopefully it went on to live a better life than what I gave it.
 
I was pulled over some twenty years ago in Death Valley on the cutoff road between Beatty Junction and Hell's Gate; pulled over in an air-cooled VW Camper, fully loaded with a family of four and all our camping acoutrements, going uphill no less! This is a vehicle that took close to a minute to get up to 60 miles-per-hour under the best of conditions, but I will admit that once I got it up to that speed I was very reticent to give away those hard-earned gains.

The ranger told me I was going 60 in a 45 zone. I told him it was the most ridiculous 45 zone I had ever encountered since the sight lines up the practically-straight road usually measure in miles. He explained that tourists running off the road while gawking at the scenery were the reason for the posted speed limit and asked me if I would please slow down. Faced with this peculiar set of circumstances I succumbed to my recurring weakness for telling the truth at all the wrong times: I explained to him that I was probably not capable of driving so ridiculously slowly, that the only thing that might keep me within the speed limit is the weak little pancake engine that must now get back up to speed on a steady uphill grade.

The officer, with considerably more forgiveness and understanding than I had any right to expect, turned to my wife who was blushing from embarrasment and said "I'm not going to write him a ticket. You keep him in line, will you?"

....And she did.
 
Kind of like how I have to drive the Jeep. Those 70 snarling horsepower have a little trouble on the hills. I really feel for truck drivers when someone kills my momentum.
 
Last ticket was in September 1979 in Choctaw County, Mississippi, just east of Ackerman. I got busted for 62 in a 55. That's not a typo, the citation was for 62 in a 55 zone. Most of the exploration drilling crew I was part of was running F150s with Virginia plates or Texas plates, each a "front and back" state and each bright white and identifiable to oncoming traffic from a distance. Some of the boys had been driving way too fast on the back roads while working the county, and the locals were (rightly) peeved. They sicced the Mississippi Highway Patrol on us, and in just a few days time, the Highway Patrol issued nearly 2-dozen speeding tickets to us boys from Virginia and Texas. The first few were real zingers with ticket-worthy numbers, but I got mine on the last day of the crackdown, hence the piddly-#$$ charge. I went to "court" in Starkville, where the procedure was to appear before a Justice of the Peace in my "home" county (where we had an apartment for a year or so the next county over). The JP is a part-time gig, so my courtroom was the office of the JP's tire and auto store. I pointed at the company F150 with too-tall Co-Op Grip Spur rubber and mud all over it and stated I thought the tires might have thrown the speedometer off "a bit" and asked for dismissal. The tire dealer/JP said "boy, I've seen speedometers throwed off by 20 or 25 percent by runnin' them big tars". He told me to get a new gear in the speedo and to slow the heck down until I did. I gave him my most sincere "yes, sir and thank you, sir" and left.

Last one before that was in the old '69 Impala. Headed home from my girlfriend's house at midnight I came screaming up the 2 lane road towards a short 45 zone at a crossroad, whoaed down the the intersection, and opened her back up on the far side. She wound up to 110 at WOT before I had to get on the binders to turn off to my folks' home a short distance down a side street. Just as I turned I saw the blue lights come on a quarter-mile behind me--a City LEO had been sitting at the junction with his lights off. He heard that old 327 decel and backfire as I approached the intersection, then kick down and start winding up after I passed him. He came out after me with no lights on since there were no other cars on the road. I stopped before he caught up with me and he was mad as a wet hen and shaking. I immediately saw he had no radar readout screen on his dash and no radar unit clipped to his rear window, so I knew he hadn't clocked me. He demanded to know how fast I'd been running but I wouldn't say. He issued me a citation for "exceeding 55 in a 55 zone". My dad's lawyer advised me to pay it, saying he wouldn't want to be me in court with the officer testifying he was running up to 90 and I was still moving away from him.

Foy
 
Last one was in an Audi Fox loaded with six kayaks on top and was written for 85 in a 55 in 1984 just west of Walla Walla. I'm not sure that car could've gotten up to that speed without the kayaks on top, went to see the judge in his jambers and had it reduced to court costs.

I keep it pretty close to the speed limit these days though there were times with m old MGB and my brother's S600 that I definitely should have been written up.
 
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