A big speeding ticket for a West Vancouver man has us looking at some of the biggest and most infamous speeding tickets from around the world.
Last week, West Vancouver Police impounded the car of a driver caught doing 210 km/h on the Lions Gate Bridge. Global News reports that the 22-year-old was driving a Ferrari 458 at more than three times the 60 km/h limit on the bridge.
The big surprise for West Vancouver Police Cst. Jeff Palmer was that he had pulled over the same driver for 130 km/h last April. That's what changed the ticket into a court summons.
The 2015 Ferrari 458 has been impounded for seven days, and the driver is facing charges of excessive speed and driving without due care and attention. Palmer said that the court appearance could result in bigger fines or a licence suspension. The usual fine for exceeding the limit by more than 60 km/h is $483, driving without due care is $368, and tow and impound costs are on top of that.
Well, the verdict came in on July 10 and a 16-month suspension has been handed down from the BC Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, along with an extension of the impoundment to 60 days – and the driver could face further penalties still.
The question is, do you think the driver would rather trade places with one of others below?
One of the most infamous speeding tickets of all was the one given to Anssi Vanjoki in 2002. Vanjoki was ticketed for 75 in a 50 km/h zone in Helsinki, Finland while riding his Harley-Davidson. That's not a big ticket, but it came with a massive fine. Finland bases fines on your income, and Vanjoki was an executive with Nokia. The fine was 116,000 euros (about $171,000 CAD), equivalent to 14 days of his 1999 income.
That's not the first massive fine from a European country, and it won't be the last. Just ask the Swedish man caught driving at over 300 km/h in a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG on the A12 highway between Bern and Lausanne in Switzerland. He received a fine of just under $1 million. The driver almost got away with it too, because prior speed cameras he passed couldn't register speeds over 200 km/h. He finally came across a newer camera that could measure the speed.
The fines are calculated based on income and severity of speed. This driver was given 300 days of fines at about $3,250 per day. According to The Guardian, the driver told police "I think the speedo on the car, which is new, is faulty." That didn't stop police from arresting him.
In 2004, businessman Ronald Klos got a one-year driving ban and a $6,270 fine after what police in Fife, Scotland, called the highest speed ever recorded by their cameras. Not only was Klos clocked at 253 km/h in his BMW M3 CSL, but the camera footage showed he was on his cell phone at the time. Because if you're going to break the law, why not break all of them?
A motorcyclist in Wabasha, Minnesota, was racing another bike on US Highway 61. He didn't notice that there was a State Patrol aircraft circling above and watching them race. Two clicks of a stopwatch later and the biker was doing 332 km/h.
Fox News reported that Pilot Al Loney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that "I had to double-check my watch because in 27 years I'd never seen anything move that fast." The rider, a 20-year-old man, was the son of a sheriff's deputy, but that won't help when you're going that fast. And especially when you don't have a motorcycle license. The bike was noted as a "Honda 1000", but it wasn't clear what model that meant.
This next one is a bit of the opposite. A 75-year-old retired teacher from near Glasgow, Scotland, was fined $476 for driving too slowly. The woman told the court that she didn't usually drive at night or in the dark, and was wearing new glasses. She was slowing from 55 km/h to just 8 km/h for every turn on a winding road. The long procession she was leading was spotted by police who thought she may have been drinking.
Finally, a 20-year old Dutchman lost his own license and his dad's car after he was ticketed for doing 160 km/h in an 80 zone in Rotterdam. In his father's brand-new Bugatti Veyron. Just in case it wasn't bad enough telling your parents that you got a ticket, he had to tell them that police seized the car. It was the first and only one in the country at that time, too. For that speed, Dutch police could have seized the vehicle permanently, although it's not clear if the owner got the car back or not.
