Originally Posted by
Latitude65
Why should I plead guilty if I'm not?
I don't think it is an unheard of feat to break urban speed limits of 15 to 25mph on a road bike or a recumbent. Most of them are on streets that have little or no traffic and in some I know no buildings either. They just happen to fall in an area that has a blanket speed limit. Along comes the biker who happens to encounter a LE taking a break in what he thought was an out of the way place.
I think what CO does is probably the norm. After all a bike is a vehicle with no operator's license required.
Ignore it or not? Lots and lots of drivers don't have licenses and successfully drive for years until fate brings them to law enforcement attention from someother event.
As a car driver I have, shall we say, a certain amount of experience with the traffic law enforcement system. I cannot honestly say that I have ever been pulled over unjustly. Never. And I suppose that is why traffic courts behave pretty much as kangaroo courts. Traffic officers rarely hand out tickets without cause. But, if you don't want to plead guilty you certainly do not have to plead guilty in Illinois. If you are an out of state resident you are welcome to appear in court on your scheduled court date and plead as you wish. Good luck with that! If you are an Illinois resident you do not have the option to plead guilty and skip the court date.
I don't believe there are any public streets near me with limits below 30mph and if there are they are 25mph. School speed limits are only active on school days and when children are present but they will be in the 15 to 20mph range. It is possible for a cyclist to exceed any of those limits. In my case I need a downgrade to top 30 and there is a street with sufficient slope near my home where I routinely do that. You'd have to be going close to 40 to get a ticket in a 30mph zone near here and I can't do that even on that street. But the law is the law and it applies to all road users, motorized or not. If you are exceeding the speed limit on your bicycle you have no reason whatsoever to complain if you are ticketed.
You can ignore speed limits just as motor vehicle operators can ignore licensing and insurance laws. You can ignore them day in and day out with total impunity. Until the day you are stopped and ticketed. You can ignore road regulations all you want but you cannot ignore the ticket. The ticket is a legal notice you must obey. The system will track you down and make you pay if you try to ignore a ticket. The OP, perhaps in jest, posited that since he could be assessed no "points" that traffic tickets had no teeth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Traffic tickets are armed with plenty of teeth and they are the primary means of punishing traffic offenders. Point systems are merely secondary punishments for drivers/riders who are so bad that the normal tickets, fines, court costs, and driver's classes are insufficient to encourage better behavior. Basically if you are running afoul of your state's point system you really should be banned from the road.
Ken