Do people really get tickets for inadvertently encouraging somebody to do something that’s technically against traffic rules? Including something as benign as crossing a solid line? And a traffic cop no less, to whom it’s not a traffic infraction anyway?
Comics I Don't Understand 
“Do people really get tickets for inadvertently encouraging somebody to do something that’s technically against traffic rules?”
Just because the cop pulls you over doesn’t mean that a ticket will be written. Sometimes they pull you over to give you a warning that you’re doing something that isn’t safe (or legal).
“Including something as benign as crossing a solid line? And a traffic cop no less, to whom it’s not a traffic infraction anyway?”
Crossing a double yellow is a major infraction. It means you’re moving into oncoming traffic in a place that the oncoming drivers are blind.
I don’t think it’s so much that she enjoys seeing her husband getting caught, it’s just that she’s very happy that she’s getting off the hook.
@Kilby, You’re probably right. Wives never get snide about their husbands. ;-)
Seriously, though, the fact that she refers to the good day as coming up points to the goodness coming from something that’s about to happen.
#1 are you saying Bill that traffic cops are above the law? Because that is one of my major pet peeves, cops breaking traffic rules without either their lights on or their siren — speeding is speeding, unless you have your lights on or siren! I often dream about a popular news show regularly publicly shaming rule breaking cops on TV, but I think that fantasy only shows my age: TV? anyone caring about the news? anyone even watching the same news? and an underlying respect for the news…
#2 he’s a motorcycle, and some states I think officially allow lane sharing, so he wouldn’t have to be crossing the double yellow line.
#3 some states (and I don’t know if this is still true, but I know it was true for PA in the 80s) paint all their roads with a double yellow line to save time and money, and it’s legal to cross it if conditions allow (ie: they pass the buck to the driver); PA had (has?) signs when they really don’t want you to pass (which were always a great source of hilarity to my 11-year-old self, because I’d see a sign saying “Do Not Pass” and imagine all traffic coming to a screeching halt at the sign…)
#4 In Brazil I have seen with my own eyes a motorcycle cop use his siren to try and get a girl to turn around so he could check her out — it was totally unambiguous and totally disgusting, and pretty much sums up what was wrong with Brazil. It was 25 years ago, and one can only hope things have improved, but Brazil has been confounding optimism about its improval (to coin a word) for centuries… (It’s the land of the future and always will be, as Charles De Gaulle purportedly said in 1950.)
I think the real joke is dumped in the middle panels- Lucretia thinking what she meant to say and saying what she meant to think: “Sorry, editing error”. I am going to start using that excuse when I find my foot firmly entrenched in my mouth.
That was a rhetorical question, larK, right? Until we see a traffic cop give another cop a ticket.
Sandra Bland got out of a cop’s way & ended up dead.
Lark: “speeding is speeding, unless you have your lights on or siren”.
Not quite. A cop can be on an emergency response (and thus exempt from traffic rules) even without using sirens or lights. For instance, in a covert operation when they are following a suspect’s car.
I’m not sure how “speeding in pursuit” and “covert” can actually go together. For one thing, it endangers everybody around you. For another, the driver ahead of you going 90mph is probably going to figure it out. And if you’re in a high-speed pursuit, you generally WANT the other party to stop.
Soup Dragon: for your example, I think it would be a case of having an affirmative defense — it should still be wrong, but in certain circumstances we’ll forgive it. That said, covert and undercover cops are a major danger area: why should I pull over when some deranged seeming taxi tells me to? I’m supposed to know they are undercover cops? (I saw this in NYC a fairly recently, and it really bothered me: someone got between the undercover taxi and whatever their target was, so they pulled over the car and poured out of the taxi with guns and all, just to vent their displeasure, because they didn’t actually give the guy a ticket or anything — you just see this deranged taxi cut off some guy, and suddenly cops are pouring out of it, threaten him, and then pile back into the taxi and pull off — this is not the society I want to live in!)
Bill: you are one cynical so and so. I still have hope. I hope to one day live to see where cops give other cops tickets when then deserve it. Maybe not in this country, but somewhere in the world. It is an aspiration for the ultimate in a democratic and lawful society. The scale goes something like:
0) any country with “democratic” in its name
2) any country that has laws against offending the dignity of the government or officials
3) any country that has laws giving elected officials immunity
…
8) any country where you can freely criticize the government or elected officials
9) any country where you can make jokes about bombs in security lines
10) a country where cops give other cops tickets when they deserve it
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m about to be deported, so whatever…
“Because traffic cops can only ticket one person at a time…?”
This seems reasonable. If he sticks around to ticket Lucretia, the husband will be long gone. If he takes off after the husband, Lucretia will drive off. I guess he could ask Lucretia to stick around for 5 minutes while he stops the husband (probably a few blocks away), and wait for her ticket, but that doesn’t seem too reasonable. Particularly if he’s just pulling her over to give a warning.
“I’m not sure how “speeding in pursuit” and “covert” can actually go together.”
You’re thinking of a case where the suspect is going 95 in a 55 zone. But…
If the suspect is going 65 in a 55 zone, and the covert tail is also going 65 in a 55, but everybody else on the road is going 65 in a 55, the tail blends in.
James, first of all, a police car going 65 is clearly not what we mean by “speeding in pursuit.” And even in that scenario, there’s nothing to be gained by trying to be covert.
“a police car going 65 is clearly not what we mean by “speeding in pursuit.”
Is it not “speeding”, or not “in pursuit”?
As I said the first time, it’s a type of “speeding in pursuit” that isn’t the type of “speeding in pursuit” you were thinking of.
” there’s nothing to be gained by trying to be covert.”
You want to know where the suspect goes, and who they meet with. So you have detectives tail the suspect. If they KNOW they’re being tailed, it changes where they go and who they meet with, so you do it covertly.
Maybe the cop thinks the car he or she is following might be stolen. She the cop radios in the plate, to check to see if its been reported as stolen. While waiting for the response, the cop has to keep the suspects in sight. If the car IS stolen, and the driver believes a cop knows this, the suspect may flee, creating a hot pursuit that puts people and property at risk.
See? Cops have reasons to speed besides hot pursuit.
Several times in NE Ohio – near Cleveland or suburbs – cops HAVE pulled over other cops for things like DUI. Of course, they may not have been aware they WERE cops until they stopped them and get their ID.
The cop cams tapes are shown on the local newscasts.
Mary McNeil: In these cases, were the cops that were pulled over in police cars?
Bill, as much as it pains me to agree with James, I agree with his first comment. I don’t consider things like passing on a double yellow line minor. The key to safety on the roads is consistency. If everyone follows the rules, then everyone knows what to do and what the other guy will do.The unpredictability of not doing so ramps up the danger. As I spend most of my time as a pedestrian. I particularly need drivers to do as they are supposed to, such as stopping at the stop signs near my home so I can safely cross the street. I also feel I have an obligation to be predictable. I wait at red lights when I could easily get across well ahead of oncoming traffic, for example.
“Do people really get tickets for inadvertently encouraging somebody to do something that’s technically against traffic rules?”— I hope not. Do you know how often I encourage people to copulate with themselves while driving? That’s gotta be against the law.
When I do that, it’s not inadvertent. It’s a full-on intention-with-malice-aforethought command. In my defense, to provoke that reaction, you have to have done something REALLY stupid, like get on the road in front of me when I want to go somewhere…
@SingaporeBill, You are so right. My brother, in his 20s, was driving in his own lane, at the speed limit, up a hill, Just before the crest, another car, speeding, came at him over the hill, in his lane. He was in the hospital, begging to die, for a month or more. He still doesn’t walk quite right.
The kid who hit him died on the spot.
I think that CIDU Bill’s comment about crossing a double yellow line being minor has to do with living in the city (like NYC) rather than in a rural area. In a rural area, double yellow lines are usually in places where the line of sight of the opposite direction is blocked or limited. Crossing it puts someone in danger of a not pleasant (to say the least) surprise. In the city however the streets are straight, vision of the road is unimpaired and 2-way streets ALWAYS have double yellow lines. Therefore, when necessary to drive past double-parked cars, delivery trucks, taxis doing pickups or drop offs, etc., you look at the line of traffic in the opposite direction and if there is no one there you cross over the double yellow line, go around the obstacle, get back in your lane, and keep driving.
In the same way, sometimes when someone pulls up behind a car that is pulled over, because he does not realize that the front car are not going anywhere, the driver of the double-parked car will wave the car behind him around him — even over double-yellow lines, and the car will go around when traffic in the opposite direction clears.
California has an even more extreme version: the “double-double yellow” (a pair of double yellow lines. Legally, these are treated as eqivalent to a cement wall. Even if there is no actual barrier, they are not to be crossed for any reason (whereas there may be exceptions that permit a “single double yellow” to be crossed, such as when turning left into a driveway or sidestreet.
I wonder… are we really expected to memorize 50 different sets of arcane driving rules? Right-on-red is hard enough.
Winter Wall – to your point, I must admit no. Though I think one was and driving erratically. Several had their weapons along for the ride, though.
Try this: if a delivery van is stopped so that you can’t get past without going over the double yellow line, just wait for the van to move, an hour if necessary. see what happens. See what the nice policeman has to say.
At the risk of opening up a can of worms, MiB, that might depend on your melanin
“are we really expected to memorize 50 different sets of arcane driving rules?”
In the sense that most of us drive in, like 2 or 3 states, tops? Maybe it’s different over there where all the states are tiny little things that you can drive through in an afternoon.
There’s two parts to it. First, there’s understanding what the road markings, signage, and signaling are supposed to mean. That’s fairly well standardized. Then there’s being able to predict what the various other drivers are going to do about the various traffic control devices, and each other, which varies widely depending on where you are, and time of day, and weather.
For example, consider the reaction to about an inch of snow accumulating on the roadway. In Denver, people didn’t even slow down for that, whereas in Seattle the entire city came to a full stop, and stayed that way until it went away.
Local customs that aren’t quite in synch with traffic laws are another problem; e.g., the “Pittsburgh left” wherein the native population seems accustomed to, at a red light, allowing the first car in line directly opposite them to make a left turn in front of them when the light first turns green. Supposedly this arose a form of “politeness” so that one car didn’t have to wait until all the facing traffic had passed. Of course, the “rule” is unknown to many people and is contrary to right-of-way law.
My father belonged to the Sheriff’s Posse — a horse group that sometimes helped with crowd control. Once when we were driving a couple of states away, he had his Sheriff’s Posse on the dash when a cop pulled him over. The cop looked at it, looked at my dad, and told him coldly “That don’t cut no ice in this state.”
Which is actually something I totally forgot about when I was calling Bill a cynical so and so, but sadly totally proves I was being completely naive: cops out and out don’t give each other tickets, and blatantly signal this with the special “I am a cop” flair they put on their cars so that they can recognize each other even when not on duty… In fact, they are openly bribable, if you buy one of those “I heart the police” license plates, the secret agreement is you will get out of tickets. Friends of ours did this, bought the special license plate, and it has gotten them out of at least one ticket, when they were pulled over for something and then questioned about the plate and then let go; who knows how many times they just weren’t pulled over?
I still hold out some hope that we are further up my scale than this might indicate, in that even having seen the plate work for them, I still wouldn’t consider getting one, and I think most people I know feel similarly; the fact that the friends I mentioned are Romanian immigrants sort of proves this, in that they are recently from a more corrupt society, and so more readily engage in what most Americans (I think) regard as ethically challenged behavior…
Yeah I have seen police cars break all sorts of laws, including (often) passing people on a two-lane road (with yellow lines) who are going the speed limit.
Well I AM a cynical so-and-so, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
A few years ago I was almost creamed by a police car that came zooming off a traffic median on my left — no lights, no siren, no warning — and you know who would have been blamed for the accident.
“I still hold out some hope that we are further up my scale than this might indicate, in that even having seen the plate work for them, I still wouldn’t consider getting one”
I get the same results, via the expedient of driving safely. I DID get pulled over about a year-and-a-half ago… on New Year’s Eve, I pulled out of a grocery-store parking lot not far from my home, and forgot to turn on the headlights because the road is a major thoruoghfare and is extremely well-lit. It was about 8PM. Plenty dark, but really too early for DUI stops (I’m assuming, being not a drinker any of the time.)
lARK – We drive in the general area around York/Lancaster/Chester counties quite often, as well as north as far as Allentown out to Carlisle, down to MD overall area and have been doing so since the mid 1970s.
I never noticed that all roads were double yellow line and will look for it on our next trip.
I do know that we had a bad night driving about 10 years ago on PA 23 heading east from the East Earl/Blue Ball area to Morgantown. It was a “dark and stormy night” with no moon and Robert had not yet had his cataract surgery and was driving. There were no visible markings on the road – which goes up and down and hills and through small communities,with street lights only in the small communities. Robert gets car sick and has to drive, always – the road was unmarked enough that he could not see to drive and actually pulled over and let me drive. I had to watch the utility poles with one eye while driving to figure out which way the road was curving. Any road markings (which are now there) would have helped – a nice double yellow line would have been so nice.