Once again, a Facebook Friend unwittingly comes to my rescue when I need something to write about. She went down to southern Virginia to fight a traffic ticket and ended up catching a break from the judge. And so here is a similar story from my own past that I trot out whenever the topic of conversation turns to traffic tickets.
Back in my college days, I lived in an apartment complex that had a one-way entrance. You could go right into the complex from the main street, but to get out, you had to wind your way through the rest of the complex, then through neighborhood back streets until you finally got deposited back onto the main street. And if you didn't already know how to get back to the main road, you had a pretty good chance of getting lost, because anyone with any sense of direction would take a right turn onto the neighborhood back road, when the correct answer was, in fact, a left turn.
As luck would have it, my apartment was in the building closest to the entrance, just about the furthest point from the exit. And so it was that, one fateful morning, I found myself running late for class and faced with a decision: Go the wrong way on the short, one-way entrance road onto the main street, or do the legal thing and add two or three minutes to my travel time. I took the quick way.
As I was pulling out onto the main road, I could not help but notice that there was a car barreling down the hill towards me. My first thought was that this explained why you aren't allowed to go out that way - downhill traffic is hard to see until you're actually out there in front of it. My next thought, after I had floored it to get myself going fast enough to match the speed of the car coming down on me, was that the aforementioned car wasn't going nearly as fast as I had previously believed. Almost as if it had made a big effort to slow down. Then I finally noticed the cop standing in the road signalling me to pull over.
He asked me if I knew why he had pulled me over. I knew it was either because I had gone the wrong way on a one-way, or it was because I had been going pretty fast to avoid getting hit from behind, but I wasn't sure which had gotten me busted. So I just said yes. I got my ticket and went along on my less than merry way, getting to class even later than I would have if I had gone the legal route.
My day in court eventually came. I got up before the judge and told him that I had been late for class and made the decision to go the easy way out, instead of the long way, and he told me I was the most honest person he had seen all day and knocked off almost the entire cost of the ticket. He also didn't put any points on my license.
I don't know if owning up to it helped, or if I was going to get let off easy anyway. There was another guy in the courtroom that day who had done the same thing at the same place (perhaps even the same day,) and he either claimed ignorance of it being a one-way or acted like it was an understandable thing to do, given how hard it is to leave the area otherwise. Don't remember which it was, but I can't say as I remember him getting off as easy.
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