How to Avoid Getting a Speeding Ticket and Myths

We Refinishers Are Exposed To Tickets More Than The Average Joe. Traffic Cop Tells All: How to Avoid Getting a Speeding Ticket (and Other Tips)

Okay, so the best way to avoid getting a speeding ticket is not to speed, but you knew that. What you really want to know is, how do you speed and not get a ticket?

By Matt Peckham 

Matthias Clamer / Getty Images

Okay, so the best way to avoid getting a speeding ticket is not to speed, but you knew that. What you really want to know is, how do you speed and not get a ticket?

One way: Go 189 m.p.h. That’s insane, of course, and you’d have to be to drive that fast anywhere not a speedway or the Bonneville Salt Flats, but according to former traffic cop Mike Brucks, that’s what it took for him to let a speeder go.

“I clocked a guy on a crotch-rocket bike doing 189 mph,” said Brucks in an interview with Popular Mechanics. “Just let him go. Since police departments began to get sued for chasing speeders, around 1995, there’s a fine line. You have to determine if you can catch him, if chasing him will cause an accident for him, for you, for the public. There’s no way to catch anyone like that.”

After working as a military traffic cop for six years, Brucks joined the El Paso Police Department where he dueled with speeders for 22 years from the back of Kawasakis and Harley-Davidsons before retiring last May. Over the course of his career, he says he issued nearly 40,000 tickets. Why motorcycles? Because they trump cars when it comes to catching speeders: You can accelerate faster, says Bruck, and they’re easier to navigate through traffic.

What were his favorite hiding places? Overpasses and bridges on freeways, but even then, he notes, location was everything: “If there are a lot of exits, I can miss [a speeder] who can maybe get off at an exit, and then it’s too late to catch him.”

A lot of people assume, rightly or wrongly, that the margin over the posted limit you can speed before a traffic cop’s going to bother is around 10 m.p.h. For Bruck, it was more like 20 m.p.h., at least in areas he says had “a lot of visibility,” though it sounds like anything exceeding 80 m.p.h. was cause for pursuit. ”Above 75 mph things just happen so fast, [whether it's] a flat tire, a coyote, wind, dirt, or rocks,” he says. “It’s not that much better now that cars are safer; reaction times are still the same.”

While talking your way out of a ticket is probably next to impossible, Bruck says someone speeding to get to a family member just sent to the hospital might do the trick. Also: if you’re tracking down your spouse, who’s having (or about to have) an affair.

“I clocked a woman coming down from New Mexico on Highway 54 at 111 mph,” says Bruck. “She had just been stopped for going 90 mph 15 minutes [earlier] in New Mexico … She had been crying, and the tears didn’t just start — they’d been going on a long time, you can tell. She was on her way to a motel in El Paso to catch her husband who was shacked up with another woman there, cheating. How do you write a ticket for that?”

Try this:

Pull your license and insurance papers out and put them on the dash in front of you before he gets out of his car or off his bike. Put your hands on your head or the dash in front of the wheel. Apologize for making him stop you and explain that you know traffic stops are fraught with danger and tell the truth about your speeding. If it is dark don't forget to turn your interior lights on before reaches your vehicle in addition to everything else.

Check out these myths:

6 Myths That Are NOT Going

To Help You Win Your Case

(Avoid This Loser Advice!)

Let’s just debunk a few myths quickly. This should save you from spending money on ridiculous scams and relying on faulty tactics.

Myth #1:

I wasn’t really speeding and the officer will have to tell the truth (I have notes).

Nope. He won’t. You can’t hope to challenge the officer’s recollection of the events.

If there were three other cars and a truck coming down the road at the same time as you, he will say there was only one and he will be believed.

(You don’t think the court is going to take your word, or the word of your biased witness, against his, do you? I hope not.)

Myth #2:

There is a mistake on my ticket.

Possible. But it must be a fatal flaw and not an immaterial mistake. If the license plate # is wrong but the officer identifies your car – you lose.

If your name is spelled wrong – you still lose. If the ticket says a Grey Saab and you have a red pick-up – you win that one. (Save your money and don’t buy the book.)

Myth #3:

Try to get your case postponed hoping the officer doesn’t show.

When the officer does show up, what do you do then?

(There’s actually a book out there that advocates finding out when the officer is on vacation and trying to schedule the trial then. Sure, the cops at the station will be happy to hand out their work and vacation schedules. Why not ask them for addresses and their kid’s schools while you’re at it!)

Myth #4:

Claim “Speeding out of necessity”, or some other “can’t fail” excuse.

(There better be someone bleeding in your back seat to make this one work.)

Myth #5:

Plea bargain to go to traffic school.

Why in the world would you want to do that when you can get 100% off? Most pleas fall on deaf ears. These folks go through case after case after case and have heard it all before.

If they are willing to negotiate, they will ask you.

(Unless of course you like pleading with hard-asses and hope to be allowed to go to traffic school as a remote prize).

Myth #6:

I can trip up the officer through my clever questions and reduce his credibility.

If you are really, really good, you may catch Officer Stone on some inconsistency. But it is highly doubtful you can beat him this way.

He is trained and does this all the time. Remember, the court is on his side.

So if you thought any of the above tricks were going to get you off, think again.

Gimmicks don’t work.

The above information was taken from the Speeding Ticket Fixer web-site