most cars show faster than what you are actually going. if your car shows 63 and his radar shows 65, ask when his radar was last calibrated as they need to be calibrated regularly. dont be a dick to the cops. tell them you thought you were going 63. they will sometimes be reasonable and let you go with a warning. there is always a bit of a grey zone with the speed limit. they could give you a ticket for being 1mph over, but that be completely stupid. if the road is empty and youre going 15mph over the limit, the cop may think there is no need to give you a ticket and just warn you. there is no specific rules for the cops that say they HAVE TO pull people over if they go a certain amount over the limit. it depends on road and traffic conditions. they just do what they feel is right. as i mentioned above when i was in north carolina the speed limit was 65mph and all traffic was going 80-85mph. what are they going to do, pull over a couple hundred cars that were driving just fine, even though they were breaking the speed limit? thats nonsense. we already have enough Grammar Nazis, we dont need Driving Nazis.
I found when I was driving with satnav, my speedo read 2mph faster than my satnav indicated. So it's nice having a little bit of buffer.
You may see doing 80-85 as fine. But what if the road can't cope with that? A pot-hole shows up on a major road. Let's say another day they were all doing 80-85 when a car hits the pothole, loses control and then crashes into another car. You're more likely to get a bigger pile-up due to stopping distances being bigger. By the way, before you call this nonsense. People in the year above me died by hitting a pot hole at speed, losing control and crashing into a tree. Luckily there was no other car involved, but imagine if there was.
Interstates in the US are designed to be able to land aircraft on. 85mph is not unsafe on those roads.
Interesting thing on that, a few people have exploited the necessary calibration by challenging their tickets in court and requesting a radar gun specialist. Since there really aren't many, they often miss the court date and the ticket ends up being judged unjustified. I get that there has to be a gray area, but what seems to really be avoided is the way the gray area is so specifically described. How can you specifically describe a gray area? Its very nature is being, well, undefinable. The nature of the law, specifically the US one, is that speed limits are indirectly 5mph higher than they read. I'm not saying it's a huge exploitable issue, jus that it's odd that an officer cannot, as far as my understand goes, write a speeding ticket for going 64mph on a freeway. Why would he? I don't know. It's pretty obviously a gray area and chances are the driver isn't trying to, but he cannot. So the limits are not strictly limits, by the definition of the word.
i have had training for driving at speed, i am an ex ambulance driver, as a rule i don't speed. i believe the chief constables guidelines recommend 10% +1mph, this doesn't mean you can get away with speeding, but that, it covers errors in equipment. how many people take their cars to have the speedo calibrated, not many, in fact you will normally find that in traffic police car, they have a seperate calibrated speedo, in addition to the normal car speedo.
