On the way home from paying some of Gilliam County's taxes, I was thinking about the problem of high speed limits and people who don't feel comfortable driving that fast feeling forced to. Also, encouraging fuel conservation is a good thing. What I came up with is the following:
1. Go back to the Basic Speed Rule and set the "max" speed at the maximum a reasonably competent driver in a typical modern car can drive safely on the road, as determined by driving professionals.
2. Set an "Energy Conservation" speed at 75% of the Max speed.
3. As with the old Basic Speed law, exceeding the max speed is "prima facie" evidence of driving unsafely, and gets you a pretty stiff ticket. Except if you have been driving for at least 10 years, and have had no accidents, your fault or not, in the last 10 years. That is "prima facie" evidence that you are a good, defensive, driver whose judgement can be relied on to determine when it's safe to drive fast and when it's not.
4. To better manage the speed differences that will occur, if you're outside a large city (I think they're using 50,000 for the speed limit raising under consideration), you cannot use the leftmost lane if you're driving less than half the difference between the EC and the MX speeds. For example, if the EC speed is 60mph and the MX is 80mph (a reasonable setting for the freeways), you can't use the left lane unless you're going at least 70. You would be allowed to use it to pass, as long as you are passing the traffic on the right at a speed at least 5mph faster than they are going --- you can't go over there and sit claiming you're "passing" them.
5. If you're in an accident, you lose speeding priviledges, and if you caused it, it's an automatic Reckless Driving charge, and you are limited to the EC speed for the next 5 years. A second accident in those 5 years and your license is suspended for 5 years from the time of the second accident.
6. Drunk driving would carry 5 year suspension on first offense, and permanent suspension on second. I'm not sure just what state a given blood alcohol content maps too, but at a certain point (.2? .15?) where you're obviously drunk with significant motor impairment, it would also carry an attempted manslaughter charge.
Anyhow, that's how I would reform driving laws if I had any say in it...
Well, Monday I stopped by the Arlington Municipal Courthouse. The ticket said 11am, I got there 10:30ish. There was a court in session and they said "we'll see if she'll take you now" and she did. Very young judge I thought --- early 30's. I thought she did a great job though --- for example, someone got hit for open container after he'd gotten stopped for speeding or something and went to get his registration out of the glove box and one of those little tiny liquor bottles fell out. You couldn't get drunk on one of those if you tried. She didn't dismiss it entirely, but said she'd look at the police report and make a determination, but it was clear that if he was telling the truth, he'd get off. This is the way courts are supposed to work, though it would have been better if the cop had had more sense in the first place.
Oh, and when I came up, I explained that I'd been experimenting with running with the cruise control off, as it seems like it gets better gas mileage if you don't use it, but since this Escape drives so much better than my Explorer, 80 feels the same as 65-70 did in the Explorer. Since I get considerably worse gas mileage at 80 though, I've gone back to using the cruise control. All of which is true.
I said that to show that I was unlikely to be a repeat offender, though her comment was "at least you're honest" and gave me the minumum fine: $180. For a $240 ticket, that paid for the trip, and I was out of there by shortly after 11am, so I'm as happy as I can be.
I hear there's a move afoot to raise the speed limits again though, and I do hope they are successful...
On the Tonight Show tonight, they had a pretty funny guy on who googlewhacks and goes to visit the site owners he finds. Googlewhacking is putting two words into google and coming up with 1 and only 1 site found. Of *course* I had to try it ;-) and eventually succeeded with "batie supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", which took me to what appears to be a bibliography buried in The American Dialect Society. I was debating whether or not to send mail to the adminstrator telling them they'd been googlewhacked but on their contacts page, they have a number of reference links, including Word Origins. I find etymology fascinating, so zoomed off on that tangent. Unfortunately, there was a word just the other day I wanted to know the origin of, but now can't remember what it was. Oh well. Poking around at wordorigins, I ran across the most famous four-letter word, and of course had to check it out, where they debunk the most common explanation circulating the internet, but at the end had this interesting paragraph about a related gesture which is far older than I ever imagined:
There is also an elaborate explanation that has been circulating on the internet for some years regarding English archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew! This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However, there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it is virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture, showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts.
...followed by a link to an entire *book* on the one word. I do vaguely remember a rather humorous posting descibing the versatility of it, but an entire book?
And with that bit of highbrow insightfulness, it's way past my bedtime...