While common sense traffic rules are the same everywhere, each region (even within the same country) has particular aspects that you need to be aware of when driving through.
It’s like the tolerance for alcohol at the wheel – some places accept it within certain limits, others ban it completely while there are also those places where slipping a dead president in between your papers as you hand them over gets you out of trouble as well. It doesn’t apply for speeding in the US state of Virginia, though…
As with DUIs, the harshness of speeding penalties is not constant.
Jalopnik editor Patrick George experienced these drastic differences first hand when he was pulled over in Virginia, after having been clocked at 93 mph or 148 km/h on a stretch of straight rural road (at the wheel of a Chevy Camaro ZL1 – pictured) – the limit there was 55 mph.
The penalty for this offence was not a big ticket, as he was expecting, and instead he had to spend three days in jail, which he did.
Still, in his defense, he says the road he was caught speeding on wasn’t heavy with traffic nor was it near any schools or other points of interest that would have made the circumstances even worse.
The moral is simple: never speed in Virginia, or watch the video below and try to find a chink in their armor and fight the system.
By Andrei Nedelea