CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK
« The Questions We Should Ask
The Jaywalking Menace »

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.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]

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.

4 Responses to “The $600 Speeding Ticket”

  1. Clarence Says:
    October 15th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

    I had no idea. This is a way cool stat.

  2. new reader Says:
    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…

  3. Lee Watkins Says:
    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.

  4. Nate Says:
    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???

Leave a Reply

Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

Upcoming Talks

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Twitter
October 2009
M T W T F S S
« Sep   Nov »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031