The $600 Speeding Ticket
Around 1909, a speeding ticket was a price proposition in today’s terms, notes the Boston Globe:
Speeding fines were enormous, starting at $25 - the equivalent of $600 today, according to the scholarly website www.measuringworth.com.
Of course, no one had a speedometer in his car to know how fast he was going. Nor did the police have any way to record speeds, or patrol cars to catch violators - though they probably could have tracked them down.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under Traffic Enforcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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October 15th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I had no idea. This is a way cool stat.
October 17th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Could this really be true? It’s from wikipedia:
“The most expensive speeding ticket ever given is believed to be the one given to Jussi Salonoja in Helsinki, Finland, in 2003. Salonoja, the 27-year-old heir to a company in the meat-industry, was fined €170,000 for driving 80 km/h in a 40 km/h zone. The uncommonly large fine was due to Finnish speeding tickets being relative to the offender’s last known income. Salonoja’s speeding ticket was not the first ticket given in Finland reaching six figures.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_ticket)
also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3477285.stm
Interesting concept, making the fine proportional to income. Kind of doubt it will catch on…
November 5th, 2009 at 8:37 am
interesting that many fines in the city here were set almost 100 years ago. They certainly were high fines at the time. In addition parking tickets keep adding interest indefinitely in Baltimore, (until recently they might have fixed that?). There were several people a year or so ago tracked down who owed thousands on interest for a couple minor parking tickets written ages ago.
November 16th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I’ve often wondered what was the point of speed limits 100 years ago. Like you said, nobody had speedometers and radar hadn’t been invented yet. So how did anyone know if they were going faster than the 5 mph speed limit???