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On the road, your lives are in the hands of bureaucrats and engineers. Be afraid.
I got a ticket today for making a right hand turn from a right hand lane onto a major two-way street that was intersecting with the one I was on at a near-perfect 90 degree angle. I didn't go through a light, I didn't have to go across a lane of traffic, I just turned.
I didn't see the no turns sign that was apparently there. Or that (entirely anti-intuitively) they had made a small connecting street a block before the intersection the only official way to get from the road I was on to the road that I wanted to be on. It's kind of a convoluted jug-handle thing.
What really gets me is that I made the turn, then came up to the intersecting street and yielded like the sign there said. Let a car go through. Then I went, since they had a stop sign. Then a police car went through the stop sign on the connecting road and started following me. I started watching my speed, careful to stay at the speed limit. Three speed limit signs later, he finally turns his lights on and pulls me over. Asks me where I'm going, why, and if it's my car or my parents. Then asks me if I know why he pulled me over. I say no, and he tells me it's for the illegal right hand turn I made off of the original road. I dunno, but something just feels wrong about that... why did he wait so long to pull me over, then?
It's going to be three points on my license, though he said I could probably go to court and get it reduced... I'm not really sure what grounds I could argue to get it reduced, though, other than the fact that I didn't see the sign, or my opinion that making right hand turns illegal there is positively ludicrous.
In the end, I'll just say this: Jersey is getting jug-handle crazy.
I got a ticket today for making a right hand turn from a right hand lane onto a major two-way street that was intersecting with the one I was on at a near-perfect 90 degree angle. I didn't go through a light, I didn't have to go across a lane of traffic, I just turned.
I didn't see the no turns sign that was apparently there. Or that (entirely anti-intuitively) they had made a small connecting street a block before the intersection the only official way to get from the road I was on to the road that I wanted to be on. It's kind of a convoluted jug-handle thing.
What really gets me is that I made the turn, then came up to the intersecting street and yielded like the sign there said. Let a car go through. Then I went, since they had a stop sign. Then a police car went through the stop sign on the connecting road and started following me. I started watching my speed, careful to stay at the speed limit. Three speed limit signs later, he finally turns his lights on and pulls me over. Asks me where I'm going, why, and if it's my car or my parents. Then asks me if I know why he pulled me over. I say no, and he tells me it's for the illegal right hand turn I made off of the original road. I dunno, but something just feels wrong about that... why did he wait so long to pull me over, then?
It's going to be three points on my license, though he said I could probably go to court and get it reduced... I'm not really sure what grounds I could argue to get it reduced, though, other than the fact that I didn't see the sign, or my opinion that making right hand turns illegal there is positively ludicrous.
In the end, I'll just say this: Jersey is getting jug-handle crazy.
