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Upsetting Experience- Section 146 (3)
First of all , I just want to say that I stumbled onto your site and love it. It is so informative and brings up issues and rules that we sometimes forget as drivers.
However, the reason I am writing involves an issue that has angered me quite a bit. I live in a small BC town and was in the car with my two year old son and my mother in law out to drop off my son. I was stopped at a stop sign and accelerated into a right hand turn and on to a long straight road. When I took the turn I noticed a car travelling in the same direction as me (in the distance) but was closing the distance quickly. And so I accelerated into the turn as opposed to making a smooth turn. Now being in a small town I was on the road with the usual speed trap van set up. As I noticed it 150-200 metres away I made sure that I was not speeding. I continued driving toward the officer's van and he jumped out and waved me over to the side. In fact the officer was actually speaking/joking with a bystander as we were driving up toward their direction (I know this as I noticed the bystander laughing prior to us arriving). The officer got out of the van and said that he clocked me at 69km an hour and wrote up the ticket MVA 146(3). Now, as a father I take my driving practices very serious-even more so when your mother in law is in the car! Can you give me your professional opinion on whether there was a chance for error on the officer's part with the following information.
1) There were other cars on the road(both lanes) especially the car behind me that was speeding and whether the radar picked him up and then me as I turned into the lane?
2) Can the officer (or anyone?) really do his job properly if he is joking around/having conversations with someone else. This point had made me very upset as I had seen this same trap set up before and had seen this bystander there chatting with the officer while he was in his van. In fact, I went and grabbed my camera after I dropped off my son and pulled off to the side of the road and snapped some photos of the same bystander chatting with the officer fifteen minutes later!
Do I have enough to dispute this ticket (what do I have to prove) and if so what are my options?
Thank you in advance and I have already forwarded a request for you article in our community paper!
How to Deal with a Traffic Ticket would be useful for you to read.
Speed limits
146 (3) If the minister responsible for the administration of the Transportation Act has caused a sign to be erected or placed on a highway limiting the rate of speed of motor vehicles or a category of motor vehicles driven or operated on that portion of the highway, a person must not, when the sign is in place on the highway, drive or operate a vehicle on that portion of the highway at a greater rate of speed than that indicated on the sign for that category of motor vehicle.
Sign as evidence
201 The existence of a sign permitted by this Act and purporting to regulate the use of the highway in any manner is evidence the sign was duly erected and maintained by the proper authority under this Act and in accordance with this Act and the regulations.
To prove this speeding offence in court I would have to testify to the following:
- The date, time and place
- That the motor vehice was being driven on a highway at a speed above the posted limit
- That I measured the speed of that vehicle with a speed measuring device
- That the speed measuring device was accurate and working properly at the time I made the measurement
- That the operator was qualified to use the speed measuring device
- That a sign was in place regulating the speed
- That the accused in court was the driver of the motor vehicle at the time of the offence.
It is also acceptable to estimate the speed of a vehicle without using radar or laser but given the speed of 69 km/h I expect that it would not be an estimate in your case.
I am also going to guess that laser was used to measure your vehicle as it is rare these days for stationary speed measuring to be done by radar. However, to be sure, you can request disclosure. Laser is very precise in comparison to radar and allows the operator to pick single vehicles out in either direction to 600 meters and more and measure their speed separately from others in the traffic stream.
When I worked operations like this almost always many of the vehicles were speeding at the time when a group would approach my position. I usually tried to pick the fastest, but picking any vehicle above the speed limit is possible. As my old supervisor used to ask angry people who complained that they were singled out, "Have you ever gone fishing?" "Did you ever catch ALL the fish?"
Yes, an officer can have a conversation with someone else and still do the job properly. When I worked in a group like this we would frequently banter with each other if everyone wasn't busy writing. There would be many reasons for that other person being there. He might have been an off duty officer, he could have been a citizen curious about what was going on and he could have been a friend visiting while the officer worked. You could raise this issue at trial but I think you would have trouble convincing the justice that a second person present so distracted the office that they chose the wrong vehicle or made an inaccurate measurement.
The most obvious defence to a speeding ticket is to show that your vehicle's speed was not above the posted speed limit. Not only are you going to have to testify that your speedometer showed that, but also that you have recently tested the speedometer and found it to be accurate. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to run through a Speed Watch setup, making sure that you are the only vehicle present, and see what their reader board says. It uses a radar with the same accuracy as police radar. About the only thing that you cannot say about that is that the speed reader board radar was tested for accuracy unless you check with the crew.
About the only issue in your explanation that concerns me is that you turned in front of a vehicle where you felt it was necessary to pick up speed more quickly than normal. I am hoping this is because it was not possible to see the other vehicle when you started your turn rather than a situation where you should have seen it and chosen to let it pass by before you turned. The traffic court justice generally has a lot of experience and would think of this as well.
Thank you for your kind comments, I do put a lot of time into the site because I enjoy doing it. Which newspaper did you ask? Perhaps I can follow up you request with one of my own.