This is the Most Unfair State For Car Owners

- A while ago, our creative director, the brilliant and handsome Jesse Wood, was filming a rally that went down the east coast of the US. Jesse said that when it came time to drive south from New York to Miami, everyone They chose to drive through Virginia. . He said very cryptically. - Nobody drives through Virginia. - And everyone in the office said: "What, why?" But when we turned around, he was gone. In its place was a single white rose. As clueless West Coasters, we wanted to know why Virginia is not a good

state

to drive in. And let me tell you, we found it to be much more interesting than we expected. (bright, upbeat music) I'm so excited to announce that we have a collaboration with Lean Customs to make our own enamel pins.

You've probably seen these pins all over Instagram or on my backpack saying, super high quality, it's in our store right now, so check it out. For just $10, you can wrap a jacket, a hat, a backpack, whatever, like stick

this

on whatever you have, stick it on my skin. Now available in our store, click the link and get one for yourself, they are great. Guys, thanks for clicking on our video, if you like it, make sure to subscribe to our channel, hit the bell so we can keep bringing you new videos every week. In

this

video, we'll talk about what makes certain

state

s worse for driving than others and how the government exploits driving laws to increase state revenue.

But before we get to that, let's enter the

most

unfair

,

most

despicable, and most infuriating state to drive in: Virginia. Driving in the state of Virginia can be frustrating. You will encounter hassles that you would find in many other states. But then we found a driving statistic that blew us away. Voila, one in six drivers in Virginia has a suspended license. With one in six million drivers registered in the state, that means nearly a million people are driving illegally. That's an insane statistic. Think about it. If the same percentage applied to California, 4.3 million drivers would be driving with suspended licenses.

Frankly, that would explain a lot: people are kind of bad drivers. I totally forgot buddy, I bought pizza, I love pineapple. But that's a story for another video. Yes, people probably shouldn't drive with suspended licenses, but the reason they were suspended was what really surprised us. Virginia has a law that says if you go 20 over the speed limit and you get caught, you won't get a speeding ticket, you'll get a reckless driving ticket. Reckless driving is a misdemeanor, which means it is on par with a DUI, which means you have to spend a lot of time and money in court fighting to get it reduced to a simple speeding ticket or paying between $350 and $2,500 or reckless driving. ticket.

Compared to the average fine of $250 for a normal speeding ticket, that's a big jump. And you could say it's easy, Nolan, but don't speed up. And that's a good point. But it's not that simple, plus let's be honest, everyone likes to speed even if you don't want to admit it. The speed limits in Virginia are notoriously low, the streets on which a driver could safely drive at 35 miles per hour are limited to 25. Many roads are limited to an anemic and exasperating 55 miles per hour which, compared to the rest of the US, are very slow. This makes it easy to speed up without even realizing it and creates opportunities for speed traps.

Virginia loves their speed cameras. (violin music) If you're not familiar with the term, a speed trap is basically when a police officer stops on a stretch of road or highway that has a sudden drop in the speed limit. It is very easy to fall into these traps if you are an out-of-state driver and perhaps missed a traffic sign. And let me be clear: the main goal of a speed trap is to make money. They call it for-profit policing and it sucks, hands down. - It is a trap. - One of the most egregious speed traps in the US is a stretch of I295 that passes through Hopewell Virginia that earned the nickname the "million dollar mile." It got that nickname because it nets the district nearly $2 million a year in speeding tickets.

What are they spending that on? There are 11 sheriff's deputies working 14-hour shifts handing out tickets on the two-mile stretch of highway. It's only two miles long, so it literally costs $1,000,000 per mile. And all that money goes directly to the city of Hopewell so they can hire more officers, buy more speed cameras, and buy faster cruise ships. It's easy to try to justify laws by saying they reduce accidents and increase safety, but at what point does it go from being a safety issue to an ethical issue? Policing for profit is pretty sticky for tax-paying citizens. And when you look at the demographic, it's the one that affects the most, it's even more infuriating.

Generally, the people most affected are low-income drivers, the people who definitely need a license to go to work. What will happen is that a driver misses a sign and gets pulled over for going over 20, and gets a ticket for reckless driving. When they inevitably cannot afford the cost of hiring a lawyer and taking time out of their work week to go to court, their license is suspended. They're in a bind, okay, they don't have enough money to pay the court fees, but they need their car to get to work so they can earn money to pay the court fees.

So they end up driving despite having a suspended license. And that's how you get almost a million people driving with a suspended license in Virginia alone. What's even sillier is that it cost the state a lot more money to enforce the law in the courts and through the DMV. In reality, it is not beneficial to anyone except the police department to earn that money from speed traps. Sorry, that's a little misleading, but it also benefits politicians. But in another way. One of the reasons these speed traps continue to exist is because it allows politicians to campaign on the fact that they not only cracked down on these bad drivers and made the roads safer, but they can also say that They raised significant revenue for the state.

It is a win-win situation for politicians. And this has been happening for a long time. Years ago, then-Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine pushed legislation that imposed an additional $1,000 fee on fines for speeding and failure to signal. That's right, he was met with so much hostility from motorists who paid more than $1,000 not to turn on their turn signals that the courts found it unconstitutional and it was appealed. You could say, thankfully, that I don't live in Virginia Nolan, your Star-Lord action figure that someone put in the microwave. Well, I have bad news for you, okay? There are speed traps all over the country, no one is safe. (siren wailing) According to a study by the National Motorists Association, between $5 and $7 billion is made each year from nationwide speed traps, which they define as arbitrarily low speed limits with strong enforcement. of traffic law designed to generate revenue from fines.

The states with the worst violations are right up there with Virginia, Texas, my home state of California, Ohio and Florida. No wonder Florida (laughs), no wonder Florida is full of speed traps; The popular vacation destination sees a constant flow of out-of-state drivers, perfect for the photo. The Sunshine State is home to two of the worst speed traps in the United States, or at least they were. The Highway Patrol in Waldo, a city with a population of 1,000, issued 12,000 speeding tickets in 2013, resulting in $400,000 fines for drivers. But rest assured, Waldo's seven-person force was disbanded in 2014, alas! The other recognized speed trap is in a town called Lottie, Lottie, Lottie, I'm going to say Lottie, where there is a sudden drop in speed for the school zone but no vertical signage to warn drivers.

That's very shady. Sometimes we don't even have the luxury of having a human stop us to issue a ticket, Baltimore City's speed camera program came under fire earlier this year for issuing tickets to cars that were stopped at traffic lights on red and even to a car that was parked, parked! Luckily for us, there are organizations trying to shut down speed traps, not just in Virginia, but across the country. One of them is AAA, the support/insurance/everything you would ever want from a company, company. I said they have been quite successful in stopping speed traps.

They recently sent 200,000 emails to members with links to email Virginia legislators to "let them know that for-profit policing should not be happening and to shut it down." The bills they're pushing would limit the amount of money a jurisdiction can retain from speed traps like the one in Hopewell, Virginia, that's hopeful, that's good, I like it. So, is Virginia the worst state to drive in? Cruise control sucks, but it's probably not the end of the world. I'm not going to form an opinion based on a comment Jesse made, even if he is very handsome, and yes ladies, he is single.

Yes, it sucks to get pulled over in Virginia, but you can't argue with the statistics. And statistics say that Virginia is actually one of the safest states to drive in. A study was carried out using five factors. Deaths from drunk driving, failure to obey traffic laws, speeding, careless driving and deaths per 100 million miles driven. Virginia had the fourth-best score of the 50 states. As much as we don't like these laws, maybe they are working. I mean you can't argue with the results. The state that scored the lowest on this list, you might ask, would be Montana, which has a reputation for being a great driving state because they don't actually have speed limits, so I'm not quite sure what to think. .

If you live in Virginia, I would really like to hear from you in the comments, I would like to hear some of your stories. Maybe you have some tickets or maybe you're driving with a suspended license. Don't give yourself away. Hey, we also have a podcast, it's called Past Gas, check it out and now we have a notification. Have you finished setting up the iPad? Why would you want to do that during the wheelhouse? What, now, no eggs for breakfast, scrambled. A little bit of crushed pepper on top. This is called breakfast. Thanks for watching, be nice, see you next time.