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The Internet

E-Paying Speeding Tickets 59

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-here's-a-great-idea dept.
lemonBoy writes "It looks like now I'll be able to pay off that speeding ticket in Texas...If you've ever been to Texas then you know about all the little burgs and villas...Paying that ticket in Hondo will be easier now that some municipalities are moving to the web for helping people pay fines." So here's the deal: Just setup cron to check & pay your fines (from a cellphone equipped PC in your trunk). Then you can speed at will (until you get to many points on your license, but we'll have to worry about that later).
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E-Paying Speeding Tickets More

E-Paying Speeding Tickets

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  • Why pay the ticket at all? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24, 1999 @07:52AM (#1728178)
    Go to the NMA's site [motorists.org] and learn how to stick it to the man!
  • This type of system has already been implemented by a company in Canada (http://www.sri.bc.ca/solution.htm [sri.bc.ca]). They also provide kiosks [sri.bc.ca] as well.
  • why not just make driving illegal, and then hook little meters up to our cars, which radio the state dept of transportation to garnishee our paychecks to pay the fines automatically.

    This whole unreasonably low speed limit/fine/selective enforcement/illegal search and seizure/ thing is complete bullshit, and now they want to streamline the process of sucking our money?

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • Hell, with Photocop, they don't even have to stop you anymore. You're ticket's in the mail.

    I think that the next step will be, a digital photo system, that's connected to the internet. It automatically email's your ticket to you, and remotely key-escrow decrypts your Quicken account, and has it paid.

    You've got mail!

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • Agreed - the speeding tax has everything to do with politics and money, and nothing to do with safety. Do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and contest all tickets you get - if everyone did, the speeding tax would go away.

  • Just hack into the Texas system and erase your tickets and while you are in there give yourself diplomatic immunity so future tickets roll off your back like water off a duck.
  • /ignore Judge

    /saveirc

  • and it's the Valentine 1. I would rather give Mike Valentine 500 bucks once than pay out the nose to the damned "law" enforcement psychos in texas forever. (gotta drive through some hick trailer park town that shall remain nameless ..cough.. white settlement ..cough.. on my way to work each day. they must make millions off of us poor suckers by making up tickets and paying off judges.)

    /dev

  • When you drive through Hondo (little town in South Texas for you non-Texans), there is a sign that says:

    "THIS IS GOD'S TOWN. PLEASE DON'T DRIVE LIKE HELL THROUGH IT."

    man, I miss TX. :)

    -Stuck on the LA Freeways
  • I'm not impressed.. you've been able to do this for a years now here in Massachusetts! http://www.state.ma.us/rmv/express/ [state.ma.us] I've done it before, and I must say, it's far more convenient than trying to find a stamp (though I suppose you can buy them online now too..)
  • A lot of high-traffic toll roads, bridges in big cities in particular, have automatic electronic metering. You attach this box to the undercarrage of your car and when you drive over the sensors, you get counted and billed monthly. Beats tokens, cards, and the lines, but yes, there are already auto auto billing systems *smirk* in place.

    My personal opinion though is that paying a ticket shouldn't be effortless. That's the "enforcement" part of law enforcement. The continuation of electronic automatic ticket billing would be to say "well why even bother to have police pull the car over? Why not just read the electronic tag at 85Mph and immediately take the appropriate amount of money from the guy's bank account?"

    ~GoRK
  • Glad someone pointed this out. Yes, years as in "> 3 years"... That's what, 42 internet years?

  • ...just give the state electronic access to your bank account. That way they can merely do a funds transfer without bothering you.

    Seriously, IMHO, dealing with traffic offenses should be as big a pain in the ass as the government can possibly make it. Perhaps then people will treat driving as the privilege that it is and not a right.

    In Illinois, there is a fairly big to-do about cities that ticket people, take the money, and don't report the offenses to the state so that the points never go against your license. That's great. You could get hit, and possibly killed, by some jerk who was speeding and should never have even been on the road as, if his offenses had been reported properly, they'd be off the road since their license would have been revoked. If it becomes so easy to ticket people and they can pay for the picket right then and there, using their cellphone, while the officer waits, what's to stop these cities from ticketing you silly stuff like going 0.1 MPH over the limit or stopping 2 inches beyond the stop sign? The city makes additional money (``Hizzoner wants to make our city a better place to live and we think that's best accomplished by getting some mahogony conference room furniture...'') and they'll claim that they're just making the streets safer.

  • I don't know about you 'mericans, but here in B.C. (Canada) we got photo radar a while back, and everyone was up in arms. A few people did things like you're suggesting, including putting a screen over the plate to fuzz it to the camera or bright flourescent lights around the plate to over-expose the film.

    The thing is, the fine for obscuring your plate is at least 3 times as much as the speeding ticket.

    Using Microsoft software is like having unprotected sex.

  • I'd like a guilty/not-guilty radio button at least. NG selection triggers an e-mail for virtual or live court appearance. Alternately, you should be able to elect to send evidence and arguments by smarmy power-point presentation or simply give the judge an URL and password for defense materials.

    There's one for developers given the profitability of specialized prison control systems and the like.

    E-just Municipal Commerce System
  • Why doesn't Fry's have a web page? We should make one for them!
    http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
  • I've heard (but not verified) that there's a law here in TX to stop small towns turning this into a business. Once they reach a certain amount of revenue, the money goes to the state.

    For the larger towns, around D/FW, they get about 5% of the their revenue from municipal courts. This includes speeding tickets, code violations such as having your lawn too long, etc.
  • Did anyone else notice that ecourtinc is running IIS on NT? (I used netcraft to check) Perhaps some script-kiddies can program their car to automatically crash this site every time they drive fast through a small town in TX :-)

    Gee, if only they'd open-sourced the code to this site, it might have had something to redeem it. Maybe we can band together and build a Moreau-esqe response to them, I propose "python-pig".
  • We've pretty much reached the stage where this is no longer news; the internet is as mainstream as it's possible to get now, and ecommerce is just seen as another option, albeit a handy one.
    I'm still getting used to this; I occasionally find myself surprised to see the internet mentioned on the tv news.
  • GM has a lot of paid lobbies. Notably the infamous "highway lobby" funded by GM and tire and oil companies, active through the entire second half of this century, attempted to ensure that every quiet little neighborhood in America had a freeway running through it, and that so-called obsolete (also very efficient and well-liked) were removed from circulation. GM might also help this org. by making individual donations.

    But THIS IS A DIFFERENT ISSUE than the highway lobby. Insurance companies make a lot of money off of trying to make driving as illegal as possible, so that people will make "mistakes" and get screwed by high insurance rates. They frequently purchase radar guns for police departments to "keep the streets safer for their customers" because every speeding ticket written gets an insurance company a few hundred dollars more in increased rates.

    Besides, I don't feel right about being stopped for revenue collection, so that the fine I pay is used to pay for more traffic cops so that they can generate more revenue. Which is that, protecting, or serving? *cough*
  • You tell all the poor rural people that they can't drive...how are they gonna get to work? How do they buy food? America has been built arround the automobile and it is an essential part of our society. I'll keep driving 'till they pry the wheel out of my cold, dead fingers.
  • The whole situation is stupid. I LIKE the idea of putting automatic meters in your speedometer that automatically give you a violation when you break the speed limit.

    For once maybe people will see how completely ludicrous the system is. I mean, the speed limit in CA is 65mph, and yet 99% of all traffic is over that. Cop rolls down on to the freeway. He picks off cars at random. Or maybe not. Maybe he chooses arbitrarily. Maybe he chooses you because of the color of your car. Or the color of your skin. The point is, he can pull over ANYBODY because nobody is driving fucking 65mph. Its the stupidest thing ever.

    Enforce the stupid laws you make, and maybe we won't have so many stupid laws.

    Sigh.
  • Why would you even bother with cops and the internet when you can have an electronic tag and automatic bank deductions? This is already in place for a Toll-Road project in Melbourne Australia and Singapore CBD carzone control. It's only a matter of time before someone else uses them for speed gates and then for parking meters.

    Despite a certain segment of the population's outcry of fascist control and outright paranoia of an overbearing brother, no matter how government is perceived, there is the very real issue of public transportation management. The no-limits on personal mobility and the pork-barrelling of highway construction has basically created cogestion effects which has led to road-rage, discrimination against alternative transportation (bikes, etc), and the usual hourly traffic stress. Given the increase in population and prosperity, can you imagine the problems if every person in India and China had the american average of 2.5 cars? After watching the driving habits of 3rd world countries, I'd be either scared out of my mind or investing in insurance companies.

    This is going to be one example of how the information age will change society. If you know the position (GPS) and connectivity (IP address) of every single car, imagine how traffic flows can be managed. Someone has to pay for the roads and ongoing maintenance and an electronic user-pays scheme seems to make sense on economic grounds. With some luck, this will eliminate one layer of road/petrol taxes or at least make it more transparent although some people may debate the merits of substituting inefficient government for efficient private fine collection. Just make sure that the gas companies don't own the petrol stations AND the tollroads otherwise you might as well redefine the word monopoly and extortion.

    LL
  • Great. Clog up the court system. Build more courts. Hire more judges. Repeat.

    End result, higher speeding fines (bad), and more taxes (even worse). I highly doubt politicians would remove a source of revenue. A few cases of "Mass murderer goes free, cites right to speedy trial" would just start this.
  • You can also use a slave-flashlight that responds to the flash from the detector. If it takes a picture of your car then, it will only show the birght light of the slave-flasher. Professional photographers use these things. There also exists special paint that reflects strong light really good. You can paint your license plate with this shit and on all pictures taken with a flash-light your license plate will look totally white. Another real cool solution would be to place a semi-transparant LCD-screen over the license plate. This is an LCD-screen that's transparant, but when you put a voltage on it, it will become black. Just have this thing controlled by your radar-detector and you're save. Unfortunately all of these solutions are illegal in my country (who cares, i don't own a car anyway).
  • Next they'll have a "Virtual Judge" that will automatically deny your request to have the ticket reduced/dismissed, ala The Simpons when homer calls the traffic cop about the boot on his vehicle, in the Simpsons goto New York episode.

    In the end..... it all comes back to old simpsons re-runs.



  • OMG, I never thought to check, and your right! I can't believe they don't have a website. You'd think a huge electronics store that they are would have SOMETHING but they have nothing, just pathetic, totally pathetic. That's news to me.
  • The Marketing of Convienience is the issue here and the internet provides it as no other medium has before. People can now sit in semi-vegetative states and do most of what they used to leave home ( or at least put an envelope in the mail box) for. As technologies (thie internet and its' evolutionar dirivitives) enable us to interact in increasingly more facile manners, albeit significantly less personal ones, most people are apt to opt for the easiest method to extracate themselves from unpleasent interludes such as 'minor' trafic violations as long as the cost does not constitute a significant burden and are therefore more likely to pay the fine FASTER (and certainly not fight the citation, vlaid or not(yes there are a whole bunch of 'erroneous' citations issued;-), even if it just means going 'downtown' or into town to do so, if given an easy way to do so. The real issue for these jurisdictions is to balance the fine structure of minor violations relative to the 'convienience factor' in the payment/litigation structure in order to maximixe the number of direct payments of fines and to minimize the court time for the judge who would much rather be on the back nine by 4:00 anyway... That is to keep the fine in the 'not too punitive range' in order to increase the likelyhood of payment without an apearence in court. A short note about Texas Having been a licensed vee-hickil operator of El Estado de Tejas Grandioso for nearly 30 years and having been issued my fair share of citations and warnings(yeah if they stopped you for no reason and you call them on it POLITELY the will usually give you a warning unless you have out of state plates) for violating the traffic laws in various jurisdictions and I assure you that the judicial districts and law enforcement agencies in this state will be the first to adapt any method (new tech old tech or no tech(cudgels et al.)) to increase the efficiency of collections( read personal income)... yeeeeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaaahh Texas the most progressive of sociological backwaters....
  • okay i cannot spell and I have clumsy fingers... so sue me
  • how about " No Contest" always my favorite..

  • the easier they make it for them to take your money, the less you'll fuss about them taking it. but no matter what.... they take... and take...and take....

  • >You tell all the poor rural people that they can't
    >drive...how are they gonna get to work? How do
    >they buy food?

    hmm.. now let me think.. there's bicycles, there's walking, there's buses, trains. Ok.. maybe for getting groceries taking a bus may be overdoing it. but bicycles are quite perfect for that. driving is not a right. mobility is.
  • Don't come to the Netherlands.. they're switching to lasers
  • We've got:

    E-Paying Speeding Tickets
    Help the Linux OpenBook Project
    Macromedia Flash for Unix out soon
    Perl Activists win White Camel Awards
    Wearable PCs
    Wacky port of BSD to Dreamcast set top box
    Belluzo post-SGI joining Microsoft
    Feature:Open Source as an Ant Farm
    Review: MySQL and mSQL
    Internet Addiction Quiz
    Anakin Actor to Star in Ender's Game
    Lineo Releases Embrowser
    Network Solutions to Sell WHOIS Ads (bastards)

    None of those crappy, high-reply, get my blood pressure up, troll topics that we've had lately like....well you know the ones.

    Good job SlashDot!

    I've been complaining about the quality of the articles here so much lately I thought I should post a positive comment when things are good.
  • In Texas [state.tx.us] we don't need no steenkeeng points!

    Speed, pay, repeat as necessary.

  • You know, I thought of that same thing. Except a black plate would cover my license plate, instead of the license plate going down. Other "ideas" of mine include high powered laser beams on the front of my car, to shoot the slow bastard trucks that plauge rt. 73 every morning. If it wasn't for Ozzy and Howard Stern on my radio, I don't think I'd be able to handle it.
  • I wish this could have helped me for my speeding ticket. I got caught speeding in some little Wisconsin town 200 miles from where I live. Unfortunately, a court appearance was mandatory. Do you think they could let me say "guilty" to the judge on irc?
  • In the end..... it all comes back to old simpsons re-runs.

    mmmmmmmmmm.... reruns. <drool>

  • Heh! I got 3 convictions, but now I got two speeding tickets in New York, good thing I'm moving here and Texas doesn't have a points system, NY just said that I'd get a conviction stub (?) for when i get tickets... also, both of
    those tickets got downgraded to ignoring a traffic control device (yay!)
  • Hehe, you should try driving through Seagoville on 175 into Dallas, there's this sign:
    "Seagoville, the city of oppertunity"
    and directly behind it is a state prison, a rather large one at that, with the razor wire and miles worth of fence =)
  • Well, from the point of view of the ever-expanding internet, it's not really news, I guess. But it's certainly a jump from accepting payment in person only to accepting payment over the internet. The few times I've been pulled over here in Texas, I've been terrified that I would get a ticket, not because of the cost of paying the ticket, but of the difficulty of driving back across the state to pay for it.
    You're right, though - at this point, it's almost more newsworthy that Fry's Electronics DOESN'T have a web page than that x now uses e-commerce.
  • been there, seen that, t-shirt, etc. it is beautiful in the hill country... my condolences on LA free?ways.... (talk about a misnomer)

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