Breakin' the Law

A perfect end to an otherwise shitty week began with sirens.

It's Friday night and I'm 10 blocks away from home in my six mile bicycle commute when I hear the whoop-whoop of a cop car behind me. So I pull over to let it go by and am then struck by that awful realization that it's whooping for me.

To cut to the chase, as it were, the cop (a woman with an Irish accent, thereby two opposite cop stereotypes canceling each other out) asks me if I realize that I just ran three red lights. (On my bicycle, mind you, in NYC.) Since it's second nature for me to run red lights on my bike, I don't know how to answer. I'm not saying here in writing that I did or I didn't, but I may as well confess that I could easily believe that I did. In any event, I take a contrite attitude, basically apologizing, because what else am I going to do, deny what she believes she just witnessed? Or argue that "everybody does it."

So I stand there for 15 minutes while she writes out two tickets. At first, I understood her to be giving me a warning and I'm unsure why she needs to actually write up a warning in ticket form, but since I've never been given a traffic summons before as far as I can recall I figure maybe this is how a warning is done.

She actually says, "I bet you're thinking I have better things I should be doing," which was pretty much exactly what I was thinking, but again, I just mutely neither agree nor disagree. I actually kept thanking her for patronizingly lecturing me that she was doing this for my own good, given that a bicyclist was killed just on the same street corner a couple of months ago after running a red light, or so she tells me about four times.

Finally, as she hands me the tickets, I naively ask, "Are there fines associated with these?" "Oh yes," she says with a grin, "there are fines."

The fucker gave me not one, but two tickets (for lights at two separate intersections, and since she began by telling me that I ran three lights, I guess I'm supposed to be grateful that she cut me a break on the third).

I quickly learned these are not $25 fines we're talking about. According to the ticket, the fine for running a red light is "1st offence: $150 plus $50 surcharge." (Why "plus $50 surcharge"? Why the hell not simply $200?) But then it says, "2nd offence: $300 plus $50 surcharge."

So on Monday I have to call the Motor Vehicles Department (which promises to be fun *) to see whether receiving two tickets at once counts as a compound 1st offence or a 1st and 2nd offence to determine whether I merely owe $400 or in fact $550 in fines for running red lights on my bicycle.

(I actually thanked the bitch.)

If they're going to start enforcing laws that for years they have ignored, shouldn't they at least put out a press release first or something? Could I actually use that as a defense? Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on statutes?

What about jay walking? Have you visited New York in the last 60 years or so? Have you ever seen a bicyclist stop at a red light or a pedestrian care about what color the little man on the sign is? What about chewing gum or whistling on Sunday? Isn't there something on the books about that, too? (I see there is a law against talking on a handheld cell phone while driving in NYC. I wonder how often they ticket people for that.)

It's almost enough to make me want to go out and buy and SUV and choke the air with soot so that her grandchildren get painful rectal cancer and the ozone hole drops a fucking glacial ice shelf on her ass.

UPDATE

So, it's Monday and I've tried answering my question above (whether my two tickets count as one or two offenses for the purposes of the graduated fines), and here's a big surprise: the NYS Department of Motor Vehicles Moving Violation and Traffic Ticket Assistance help line (718 488-5710) is a piece of shit.

My experience was that for an hour the number was mostly busy with the occasional change of pace of unanswered ringing for 50 rings or so which then aborts into a busy signal. Finally, I actually get through to a message that tells me that my calls may be monitored, which is pointless, as it then dumps me into a purely automated system (so why are they going to record my call, just for jollies listening to me curse at the automated system?). Like the best of such automated systems, it's an endless tree of options, none of which provides the answer to my question, of course.

So I'm thinking I'll just mail them $200 and hope they go away. Thoughts?