Good Year For The Outlaw

Let me first state I think Phil Luciano is a great columnist, and I am always entertained by his writing style, and “get it” when it comes to Phil’s sense of humor. He’s damn good at what he does in the paper.  But I take, shall we say, significant umbrage at yesterday’s baloney-filled column about speeding v. fuel economy.

Phil bought too far into the claims of his unnamed veteran cop “source” for this story.

This officer claims he’s surprised…I’m sorry, he said “flabbergasted”…that people are “still driving like maniacs” with fuel nearing $4.00 per gallon.

Excuse me, buddy, but I do NOT “drive like a maniac”, and just because one speeds he/she is not a “maniac”. So let’s cut the hyperbole here. To me, the “maniacs” are the a-holes who run stop signs, don’t use signals, change lanes without warning, accelerate through left-turn lane yellow- and red-lights, and follow other cars too damn close. THOSE are the “maniacs”, and those people don’t have to “speed” to be an idiot.

Beyond that, though, let’s examine the claims in the story and the math around them:

According to AAA Motor Club, Phil says, decreasing speed from 75 to 65 MPH increases fuel economy by 10%, and decreasing speed from 70 to 55 MPH increases fuel economy by 17%. First, simple math tells us that even if these claims are true (they’re not), they don’t make a lot of sense. A decrease from 75 to 65 MPH is a decrease of 14% (and an increase in time needed to arrive at the destination by that same 14%). Ever heard the phrase “time is money”? Well, in sales, it’s true. So to effectively increase my mileage by 10%, I’ve got to slow down 14% and waste more time driving. Not a good deal.

And the other example given is just as bad…to get a 17% claimed (again, not true) increase in mileage, I’ve got to slow down by 22%! In other words, my 100-minute drives back and forth to Canton everyday become 122 minutes, and I spend another one hour and forty minutes in just one week (that’s a LOT of time I could be working at my desk or making sales calls) driving my car back and forth, only to see my mileage (supposedly) increase.

But alas, it doesn’t work that way in all vehicles. Hell, it doesn’t work that way in any vehicles that I know of. Cars, like golf clubs, baseball bats, and numerous other man-made items, have a “sweet spot”. Each one is different. Some vehicles (mine, for instance) achieve peak gas mileage at higher speeds, because of the gearing and how it matches to the “sweet spot” for engine RPM.

After reading it yesterday, I did a little test this morning. I topped off my tank and headed up to I-80, where I zeroed out my trip computer and set the cruise at 70. My drive from Annawan to Ottawa netted 24.8 MPG according to GM’s uncannily accurate dashboard trip-computer that I’m happy my Grand Prix came with. On the way back, I topped off, zeroed out the CPU and set the cruise at 55. Yes, on I-80. No rush to get back. Same trip, same miles. According to Phil and the AAA Motor Club, I should have seen my mileage increase to 27.3 MPG. Um, no. Try 24.2 MPG. Yep, my car gets worse mileage at 55 than it does at 70 in the same conditions. (Okay, it was four degrees warmer, for you engineer types).

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This morning, I was offered “court supervision” instead of having my recent traffic ticket show up on my MVR for my insurance agent to see. What is “court supervision”? It sounds serious. Do I have to come to class? Well, no. Do I have to call in and report my whereabouts? Nope. Do I have to complete some kind of test or where some kind of electronic ankle bracelet? Again, nope.

So what is it? Well, to be quite honest, it’s…extortion. Oh, you say you don’t think so? Well, let’s look at a couple of the listings under the definition of extortion:

Illegal use of one’s official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage.

An excessive or exorbitant charge.

So let’s see…regarding definition #1: I didn’t see a judge, instead I met with a representative of the state’s or district’s attorney’s office, who ”made me an offer”. And regarding definition #2: For twice the amount of my ticket, I can get “court supervision” (with, as I said, no real “supervision”) to make sure the ticket doesn’t go on my insurance. I don’t know if it qualifies as “extortion” based on definition #1…although I could make the argument it’s pretty darn close as the “offer” was made by an attorney, and not the judge of the court…but it definitely qualifies under definition #2. Basically, if you’re willing to pay us a bunch more than what the ticket actually costs, you don’t have to pay more down the road. Hmmm…excessive and exorbitant? You betcha.

Naturally, I pleaded (NOT “pled”) not guilty, and I’ll be appearing before a judge (whom I did not see this morning anywhere near the courtroom, not during the “negotiating” process, I guess) next month.

More to come.

Oh, and I STILL don’t have my driver’s license…she wouldn’t give it to me today.

Good. State Police officers are going to be running a DUI Crackdown over the holidays, as they usually do. I’m glad. Of course, I wish they would crack down diligently like this ALL the time, and not just around the Holidays, but they only get so much Federal grant money to help them pay for the extra man-hours. But whatever they can do, I’m all or it. I particularly like this part of the story:

“According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, eight of the 10 motor vehicle crash fatalities over the last Christmas holiday weekend were alcohol related. Six of the 13 fatalities over the New Year’s weekend were alcohol related.”

Let’s see, that’s 16 of the 23 fatalities involving alcohol. A vast majority. Much higher than the “fatalities involving speeding by sober people” totals, for certain. My point? As always, I’m just lookin’ for an admission from Law Enforcement: Speed traps are revenue builders. Not safety concerns. But revenue builders.

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Another white guy, another legally obtained gun (he was a police officer!), another six senseless deaths. When you count the gunman, the total rises to 7.

Wisconsin horror.

When is it going to stop? When are we, as a society, going to open our eyes and grow up? Amazing. Sickening. But “don’t take away my gun”, right? Whatever.

You decide.

Is this normal?

So a man in Farmington gets stopped on a riding mower and gets arrested for driving on revoked license. Driving what?

Then,  in the comments section, there’s a bunch of “hang ‘im”-type responses, calling the man a drunk and a menace. He may be those things, (his license was revoked for DUI), but on this day he wasn’t drinking. He’s feeling harassed. I can’t say I disagree, based solely on the comments of authorities in the story.

Here was my take from the comments section:

A lot of people are calling this guy a drunk and insinuating he was drunk/bar hopping when stopped.

Read the story again. The DA himself says there was no alcohol OR accident involved. Further, it would be hard for him to kill anyone at 5MPH if he was drunk OR stone sober. I can walk faster than this lawnmower can travel, I think I could get out of it’s way. Actually, the only person that could possibly get run over and killed by a riding lawnmower would be someone that was too drunk to get out of the way. How ironic.

I have a problem with the police work on this on a couple of levels, too.

1. You ARE NOT REQUIRED to have a driver’s license to drive a lawn mower. Kids can drive riding mowers long before they get a license…are they picked up for driving without a license? I think not.

2. There are no license plates or registration required on lawn mowers, so how does that make it a “vehicle”. You get a driver’s license to drive a vehicle that requires license plates and registration.

3. And then there’s this comment from the prosecutor: “It’s got a motor, it’s got wheels, it’s power-driven, yes,” Ummm, okay, so is my self-propelled push mower. If he’d have been pushing a mower down the street, would they have arrested him for that?

Whether the guy is a drunk is not the point. How they “caught” him is what I would question. Bottom line in this situation is that he wasn’t drunk. They had no reason to suspect he was drunk. So the appearance of harassment is definitely there.

Yet another tragic loss in Tazewell County, and yet another report by law enforcement that it was a “speed related” accident. First, that’s a copout (pardon the pun). For two vehicles to collide, at least one must be moving, therefore, traveling at a “speed”…2 MPH is technically a “speed”. So, all accidents could be called “speed related”.

But that’s not the real story here. In the PJS account of the story on Tuesday, nothing was mentioned about the real cause of this latest fatality until the VERY LAST LINE of the story:

Potts said it is not official, but early indications are that Riley ran a stop sign before the fatal crash.

That makes it NOT a speed related accident, but a failure to obey a traffic control accident. And there are FAR MORE of those than there are “speed related” accidents. It’s just more propoganda being spread to try and slow people down. How about we concentrate on stopping for stop signs and using turn signals instead?

Also, the story, like every other one like it, has the police quick to point out (they can’t wait to spit it out) that the driver “was not wearing his seat belt…” at the time of the crash. I had an incident about five years ago in Bureau County, when the police called the radio station with a fatal accident report, in which the reporting officer never said “was not wearing a seat belt.”

So at the end of the report, I asked, “did the driver have his seat belt on?”

(long pause) “Um, er, ah, well, actually, it’s not mentioned here on the report.”

“So in other words, the driver that died WAS wearing his seat belt?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, you didn’t say he WASN’T wearing his seat belt, right?”

“What are you getting at?”

“If he wasn’t wearing his belt, you would have mentioned that to me, correct?”

“Yes, I certainly would have.”

“So since you didn’t say that, I can safely assume he WAS wearing his belt.”

“Say what you want.” (click)

Moral of the story: If you want to tell me about a lack of seat belt usage every opportunity you get, then you have to tell me when the driver DID have a seat belt on, too.