So what's the basis for this blog?

I going to start from the point of view that issuing speeding tickets is stealing money from people, simply armed highway robbery.
It is a primitive behaviour, meant to be a form of behaviour modification for vehicle drivers, but is just a 'civilised' way to stress people, as baboons do to each other in a troupe, dishing out stress from the most powerful, on down the pecking order.
We get pulled over and have to politely wait our turn, to be processed and belittled for being human, instead of a mechanical speed regulator, by an trained armed thug who will hurt us and ramp up the punishment if we don't co-operate. They carry a gun and a taser and bring backup for that very purpose.

To punish people with fines for being unable to operate machinery as consistently as another machine, is the improper use of the legal system.
It makes a mockery of the legal system.

Primarily, IT DOESN'T WORK! It stops neither speeding or crashes or fatalities.
The vehicles we drive aren't designed to be driven at one speed. Even cruise control is only meant for the freeway.
We are not designed as speed regulators.
We are designed to miss speed signs.

The laws that apply to dangerous machinery in the workplace don't seem to exist on the public roads.
This is a system designed to kill people in their thousands and extract a false tax from the public.
Governments across the globe are addicted to the cash and are resisting any change to a primitive abomination of a system.

Considering the seriousness of our road toll and the grief caused, roughly 400 deaths each year in Australia alone and I don't know how many maimed, (I hate to think what the global carnage is) and all they can come up with is fines and penalties. More of the same.
I turned 50 this year. That's 20,000 dead in my lifetime so far in this country alone and the best our government has to offer is to blame the drivers for being fallible and keep raking in the dollars.

Just how many has the motor vehicle killed since Henry Ford got rich?

Fact; humans will be humans. People in HR or Health & Safety understand that people make mistakes. That's pretty much in the design of the average primate. Signage and yellow lines around dangerous machines is inadequate, according to the law, as they will only save so many from wandering into harms way. People often fail to read signs. They get preoccupied and forget about the yellow lines. To keep them all safe, physical barriers are required. Effective safety measures.
To complain and say that people are stupid and it's their fault if they get hurt is both part correct and very stupid.

Firstly, it's part correct because the primate brain evolved in a fight or flight context. Survival didn't depend on mechanical behaviour. Survival depended on paying attention to the threats and responding quickly. This means our brains evolved to process huge volumes of information subconsciously and quickly, ignore the vast majority of it and focus on the bit that might contain a threat, and select a response to that threat.

 As a soup of chemicals and emotions, the human brain wanders around in a queer way with only itself for a caretaker. It may be the smartest and most amazing and complex thing in the universe, it may be the operating system of the worlds most dangerous predator, but it's nowhere near reliable enough if you're trying to remember a three item shopping list you wrote this morning! In some contexts, this miracle of the universe can seem rather klutzy. Have you ever backed a car into something? How did you feel? The human brain simply is not designed to operate a vehicle at a constant speed without ever varying.
If you had the wherewithal to redesign the human brain from the ground up, you'd end up with something very different to what's controlling your car! For starters, lets rewire the reticular activator  to pick up every !@#$% speed sign that goes by, instead of filtering them out. And how about we rework that recall functionality. I'm sure we all could use a bit more reliability in our memory.

Second, blaming the operators of the dangerous machinery is very stupid because that is neglecting the safety responsibilities. To expect people to operate dangerous machinery without installing effective safety measures first, only results in maiming and killing people. This principle is enshrined in our Health & Safety laws. Relying on the operator to never stray out of safe parameters is a recipe for disaster.
Fining the operator without protecting everyone with physical safety measures, is criminal in the workplace.

But that's actually how our justice system works when it comes to vehicles on the road. Upside down.
Twenty thousand dead in 50 years and no-one thinks there's something wrong with the transport system either and is central to why I want the fine system scrapped.

Cars, trucks and buses aren't built with effective safety measures. The road toll is testament to that. Why do safety laws apply to machinery in a workplace but the public roads have a user pays system that kills repeatedly. Speed limiters aren't a new thing. There's a variety of ways to let a vehicle know where the speed zone changes are and regulate it's speed.

Barcodes on the road, mobile phone technology, transponders to name a few I'm familiar with.

Fines don't stop speeding. They haven't stopped fatalities. This much is self evident. At what point do we admit speeding fines don't work! That all our governments are doing is letting people die so they can make money.
This is like handing out guns to little kids and punishing them every time someone gets shot. And doing it for a hundred years!

It is puerile and a dereliction of duty to put the blame on the drivers for failing to negotiate a road system designed by the government in 'built to fail' vehicles systems built by the motor industry. We didn't approve these road or car designs but we're being killed in this system every day all around the world and being held responsible for it and being robbed by armed highwaymen, employed by the government.

And the jury is well in on the result. Road deaths and fine taxes.
We've got a system here that's designed to fail and fail us it does. And if the system is designed to fail then how is it the drivers are being held responsible?

We've had the technology to prevent speeding for years and even prevent one car hitting another or hitting anything for that matter. Why isn't the transport system progressing in line with the technology? Who is stopping it? Who profits?

I'll discuss that old chestnut, "It is the drivers responsibility to know what the speed limit is at all times." Given what we know about human fallibility as it applies to the Occupational Health & Safety Act and the need for effective safety measures beyond signage, this rule is simply another part of the system designed for failure. The stark reality is absolutely no-one can register every speed sign. They're small, plain and blend into the visual clutter of the roadside. We all miss'em. We're designed with a reticular activator, a small part of our brains tasked with the role of ignoring enormous quantities of detail that poses no threat to us. Humans are designed to miss speed signs.

These signs aren't designed to jump up and down,  wave at us or to flash lights at us. They don't chase us down the road shouting, "You've picked up speed since you passed me."

Sounds a bit trite doesn't it? Yet it's not that complicated or expensive to design a vehicle to pick up on every speed zone change on the planet, never missing one. Or alerting the driver to each and every speed increase or even regulating the vehicle speed to comply with the given speed zone.

Given the cost in human misery of the failure to deliver reliable safety on our roads, weaning our governments, cold turkey from  their pointless addiction to our cash, is a no brainer.

I guess you 'get it' by now. Speed fines get up my nose. I don't suggest we should speed wilfully or that people travelling at dangerous speeds shouldn't have consequences. What I am saying is that we all naturally speed up and slow down constantly, always have and always will, and small 'over the limit' infractions make up the large bulk of ticket revenue in all countries. If these normal variations are a major cause or indeed contribute at all to fatalities then fines are self evidently useless as a means of prevention and must be replaced. We are morally bound to alter a system established in the late 1800's and install up-to-date effective safety measures. Governments won't act as they're addicted to the money. So, it falls to the drivers to find the means to alter the situation.

My interest now is to find out how we can avoid  these speed fines and share it around. Cut them of from the cash.
What has worked in court for those who fought the case and won? What didn't?
What worked on the side of the road and stopped the ticket being written out? What didn't?

I have some interesting ideas on police taping conversations as evidence that I'll share in my next post. I've been let off a couple of times in the last year having said things a bit differently and realised later that Mr Cop probably wasn't being nice, rather that tape would serve me in court, not him. What I put on his tape mattered big time.

So please share your experiences. This is meant to be an open blog, multiple authors on topic. I'm new to social media so don't be shy in helping out if there's a better way I obviously don't know about. For instance, I'm not sure how much you can fit in the comments box so tell me if you have need to be added as an author.
I understand many people wholeheartedly support the status quo. I have no interest in wasting time trying to convince you otherwise and appreciate you returning the favour.

Cheers, Bryan