re speeding ticket from chp in article pq t k i agate berkeley edu downey homer cs berkeley edu allen b downey writes fight your ticket california edition by david brown st ed berkeley ca nolo press the second edition is out but not in ucb s library good luck let us know how it goes daniel matejka writes the fourth edition is out too but it s probably also not very high on ucb s gotta have that list in article na em mcimail com mcimail com peter nesbitt writes riding to work last week via hwy from suisun to i i was pulled over by a chp black and white by the gas station by jameson canyon road the officer stated it looked like you were going kinda fast coming down highway you must have been going at least or i just said okay and did not agree or disagree to anything he said can you beat this ticket personally i think it s your duty as a citizen to make it as much trouble as possible for them so maybe they ll give up and leave us alone someday soon the cop was certainly within his legal rights to nail you by guessing your speed mr brown the author of fight your ticket mentions an oakland judge who convicted a speeder on the officer s testimony that the driver s car sounded like it was being driven at an excessive speed you can pay off the state and your insurance company or you can take it to court and be creative personally i ve never won that way or seen anyone win but the judge always listens politely and i haven t seen that many attempts you could try the argument that since bikes are shorter than the cars whose speed the nice officer is accustomed to guessing they therefore appear to be further away and so their speed appears to be greater than it actually is i left out a step or two but you get the idea if you can make it convincing theoretically you re supposed to win i ve never tried proving the cop was mistaken i did get to see some other poor biker try it he was mixing up various facts like the maximum acceleration of a cop car and the distance at which the cop had been pacing him and end up demonstrating that he couldn t possibly have been going as fast as the cop had suggested he d brought diagrams and a calculator he was prepared he lost keep in mind cops do this all the time and their word is better than yours maybe though they don t guess how fast bikes are going all the time besides this guy didn t speak english very well and ended up absolutely confounding the judge the cop and everyone else in the room who d been recently criminalized by some twit with a gun and a quota ahem ok i m better now maybe he d have won had his presentation been more polished maybe not he did get applause
