I say that because my background is in Civil Engineering. What the general public does not know is that the 85th percentile rule is used to determine speed limits in many cases. So the argument that speeding is dangerous is actually false in many cases. Mostly it's because some engineer got overruled by a politician. Is it against the law? Yes, but not unsafe and that would be my argument.
Also if you're only talking 5 mph or so it is something that could easily be explained by different tire choices. Understanding how your speedo works is important too.
i understand what you're trying to say here, but i think the "safety" argument is kind of unwarranted in court. it would be an entirely different story if we're talking about a 291C-101, the basic speed rule violation.
the point i was trying to make was that most motorists don't realize that affirmative defenses aren't very helpful in normal speeding cases. the law clearly states that if you're over the limit, you're in violation. you could try to justify yourself to the court, but ultimately you're still in violation.
I seriously doubt the radar/laser is off by 3 mph. Those devices are probably significantly more accurate than the speedometer in your car,
The speedo in your car is linked to the rpms of your drive wheels. The rpms is linked to the OD of the tire. In some cases the speedo "gearing" may not be perfectly linked to the tire diameter..........for example say Toyota uses a certain "gear" it would be cheaper for their suppliers to manufacture only certain "gears." Meanwhile the tire manufacturers have different ODs (outside diameters) for their tires..........so Pirelli, Michelin, Firestone may all produce a 205/55 R15 tire but they might all have different outside diameters. This means the same sized tire from different manufacturers will have different speeds at the same rpms of the drive wheels. Throw in the fact that the tire wears and even the same rpms of the same tire will have different actually speeds depending on how much wear the tire has.
This is the reason why the courts typically throw out tickets at +5 mph or less. Simply speaking the speedos do not record the actual speed of the car accurately most of the time.
although the radar and laser devices themselves probably aren't off, they can give severely inaccurate readings if used improperly, and those variances can be significantly more than 3 mph. regardless, this issue is somewhat off topic.
and in response to the issue you raised about the speedometers the issue has already been addressed on multiple occasions by the appellate courts (for a recent decision, see State v. Fitzwater, 277 P.3d 520 (2010)). the law doesn't care whether your speedometer was reading accurately or not. what does matter is whether you were traveling faster than the posted speed limit. If i were a prosecutor, i would argue that, if the motorist knew that there was a certain amount of variance in the output reading of the speedometer and the car's actual speed, then shouldn't the motorist have known to drive much slower than the limit so that the inaccuracies would not become a detriment later?
again, i'm not trying to argue whether the law should be this or that. I'm merely pointing out that the law is unambiguous and, because of that fact, it is difficult to prevail on certain arguments in court.