Guess what I got today........

chris,

Man, it hurts to see you wasting all this money on tickets :tsk:

Though I do know now what I *have* to get your for your birthday (it's my duty to help out friends in need)... though if you keep it up, it might have to be sent early.

Hint: it is worth its weight in gold but it can't help you out if you make a turn on red in Manhattan (your own stupidity helped you out there -- haha Geoff loves telling people that story).

Can you guess? hehe.

-t

Bimmee,

A friend of mine, when I lived in California, took it to court and won because there was no cop to show up as the witness -- so it got thrown out (or something similar -- I know it had to do with the fact that there wasn't an actual cop involved to prove that she was actually speeding or even the person driving).

I'd take it to court just to see.

Another friend does this:

In California they give you dealer-logoed plastic temporary tags and tape a registration (folded up with an expiration date that can't be seen except when looking at it from next to the car) to the windshield.

Even though he got his regular plates, he left on his dealer logo tag and the paper in the windshield so that he can't get caught going through those things. He got his car early 2000 and he still drives with it like this and no one has ever stopped him!!

A clever idea if Hawaii does something similar (dig those temp tags out of the garbage!)

Though I'm sure that if he does get caught, he'd have a lot of explaining to do

here is what one of the dealer-logoed temp tags look like.

I don't have a clear picture of what the piece of paper taped to the windshield looks like.

The main reason it's possible to do what my friend did was because the piece of paper that dealers stick in the windshield doesn't have an easily discernable expiration date on it (unlike most states, which use very conspicuous dates exactly for this reason). So therefore as long as it's there at all, everything looks kosher.

Georgia is another state that I know of that doesn't use dates on their temporary tags (or at least they didn't as of a few years ago). All you had to do was put one of the temp dealer logo tags on it or write "tag applied for" on a piece of paper and stick it to your car. The latter, especially on an obviously not-new car, would have a greater chance of getting you pulled over for them to make sure. But Georgia is a seriously f&*ked up state when it comes to traffic stuff (can't have profanity on bumper stickers/take you to jail for anything/suspend your license for no reason/regular cops can't give tickets -- you have to wait for a "traffic" cop to come/etc) but all that is another thread entirely

heheheh

the friend that got out of the camera ticket is also the friend that has great luck like you about tickets being dismissed. Except the time when she purposely scheduled her court date for the day before a huge holiday so that the cop would be less likely to show up. She was wrong -- he did!

Good luck with the whole ticket thing. Hopefully it gets dismissed because the camera thing is just lame. I've been lucky enough (knock on wood!) not to have gotten any speeding tickets and believe me, I speed, too. The Valentine One has saved me many, many times over its cost but I still have to be careful in those damned "speed patrolled by aircraft" zones. Grr :angel:

California is kinda stupid (or just doesn't care) about tag infringements. I drove around with a license plate that had been expired for at least 4 months (always scared to let a cop get behind me). In the end it never mattered because when I was on vacation someone stole the bastard. We didn't have comprehensive on it because it was a beater and we didn't bother filing a police report because 1) we were gonna get rid of it anyways (just wish we had gotten all the stereo equipment out first) and 2) if someone wanted the POS that bad.... well who were we to argue with that? (SF Bay area of California: only crimes are car theft/vandalism and cops going psychotic and whacking their ex-gf's on the 101) :yikes:

In the same area I saw far worse infractions -- people driving around with tags that had been expired for over a year or more!

The cops are probably smoking the same crack all the drivers there seem to be