yeah, those clowns weaving in and out of traffic at top speed are darwin awards waiting to happen...a shame they will probably involve some poor bastard that's just trying to get home from work...

when i living outside DC, the motorcycles were worst of all...by my count about 80 percent of them obeyed NO traffic laws at all...running lights, doing 120 mph in a service lane, street racing outide my apartment every night, etc...no matter how many times I complained to MD State police, they never did ****

 

So basically this law gives people even more reason to run from the cops.

Guy gets pulled over after pulling away from a light and the cop deems it to be too fast:
Officer: "Do you know why i pulled you over?"
Guy: "No, I was doing the speed limit."
Officer: " You were street racing, you pulled away from that light too fast, now I will have to take your car and have it crushed under the LA street racing law"
Guy: "screw that, you're not crushing my car!!" - takes off and leads cops on 2 hr car chase through the metro LA area.

After all you should punish the car, it did a really bad thing. I wonder if any of those girly man politicians ever thought to solve the problem, (nowhere to leagally race) instead of just knee jerking from the symptoms (street racing).

 

How is it that you are "punishing" an inantimate object?

I agree that there should be more places to legally race, but using that as an excuse is just using that as an excuse. Most of the idiots that street race would still street race.

 

Why not?

If the same people kept doing it, it'd be a theoretocally unlimited source of income for the city.


If someone else bought it the second time around, they could probably do something better with the car than crushing it.

 

When will LA start bull dozing houses that crimes are commited in. I can see the headlines now......." Father acused of domestic abuse so LA Bull Dozes house leaving 7 homeless" Im really getting sick of this Comunist America we live in.

 

Perhaps you should move to a more free and open country? Perhaps North Korea or Iran?

 

why move? since its the government, we cant have say in what happens? is that what you are saying? i dont know about but if thats what it comes down to, i WILL be moving elsewhere. thats one of the founding thoughts of this country. for the population to have a direct involvement. i see it slowly slipping away though.

as for the law. i agree that SOMETHINGS need to be done. i dont think that laws granting permission for a cop to tow, impound and then crush a car at his disgression is the answer though. i know for a fact that if i was in that situation i would be running. i mean think about it, you are participating in an illegal activity. you get caught and know that either way you are going to jail and your car is gone. but if you run, theres the chance you get away.

i will admit i have street raced (never at an organized meeting "spot", it was a stop light race) and i havent ever even come close to hurting anyone but myself. well i take that back. one time a person didnt yield as my light turned green. but my car was slow enough that i was able to stop with plenty of room. but that accident wouldnt have been because of street racing.

i also agree that this law opens up a lot of room for grey areas. right now its bad enough for it to be up to the officers discression to tell if you are speeding. (afterall, radar guns cant save information as well as photo proof of you driving your car in a select area thats above the speed limit) but we still get tickets everyday that are guilty until proven innocent. now we can have cops deciding if you taking off to fast from a light is street racing. i dont see anything positive from this.

 

well, afaik, there's a law that says if you take off too fast (atleast in my area) it can be deemed "excessive acceleration" or "exhibition of acceleration" or something like that
never happened to me or anybody i know for that matter, but just thought i'd point it out

 

Yeah, but what about the other two cars seized in the other raid that are to be destroyed as well? Not clear. Either way, they're taking this a little too far. To punish the driver is one thing, but to destroy cars is a whole other thing. Seems like this is something that they plan to make a habit of.

 

Though you may not realize it, you are contridicting yourself. In your previous post, you said that you were "really getting sick of this Comunist America we live in". If that were the case, then you would have no voice. Yet above, you say "since its the government, we cant have say in what happens?" This leads to the inevitable, rhetorical question - which is it? Are we communist, or do we have a say?

 

you might wanna check the screennames again Bob, cuz that was the first post ive had in this thread. its cool though.

as far as taking off to quickly, is that street racing? how do they deem street racing? what if 2 random cars take off at the same speed? i see it happen everyday at damn near every stoplight in my town. this law leaves so much grey area its not even funny. i understand the NEED for something to be done, but atleast give it a half *** atttempt at being a good recourse.

 

So if some one calls in an illegal street race that can be given a misdemeanor because they saw it happen?

I hope if I ever go to LA no one street races past me on the highway or I will have commited a misdemeanor by just seeing it happen

I'm still waiting for the "all citizens must were helmets at all times" law

 

Oops. Humble apologies. I goofed.

 

You've never been to California, have you???!

I live in Monterey, and we have the world famous Laguna Seca raceway here. There is another major racetrack 2 hours away, just north of San Francisco. The L.A. area has no fewer than 4 racetracks, 2 that I know of are open to the public at certain times.

In fact, every major California city has at least a track either within it's limits, or well within a couple of hours away.

What L.A. (it's a CITY, not an entire state, for chrissakes!) in their own over-the-top way is doing is cracking down on the kids who have more money than common sense & driving ability. We are not talking about a few kids out for some harmless fun in a desserted industrial section of town, we are talking about down the city boulevard at 100+ mph racing.

Where people my age would engage in a stop light grand prix, be mindful of others, and break it off if we pulled up on another vehicle, alot of kids today don't give a d*mn, and will cut vehicles off, dash into opposite lanes, and as you read, will end up killing someone like you or I.

I don't agree with the dramatic way LA is combating this, since auctions would raise additional money for the city (and don't think for a minute that someone hasn't brought it up there). But being that kids in LA seem to have no problem getting money (hence the ability to simply buy back their cars in auction), I can see the logic in what LA is doing.

As for your remarks about California, even up here in the granola-eating, tree-hugger territory of Northern California, places like Monterey, Salinas, San Jose, Sacremento, Santa Rosa, and many other smaller cities have a hard core car enthuiast enviroment. SoCal is a automotive mecca unlike anyplace in the country. The California Highway Patrol was the only Law Enforcement agency in the country against the 55 mph speed limit, and even today aren't likely to pull you over for doing 85 mph on parts of our interstate system.

The state of California takes up more real estate than almost every major country save Canada, China, Russia, & Australia, has an economy big enough that it would rank as the 7th richest nation on earth if it were a country, has the greatest concentration of cars (including high performance cars therefore car enthusiasts) on the planet.

So one would think that we 35.4 million Californians would have, perhaps, a couple of race tracks somewhere within our 175,000 square miles for some of our 23.4 million registered vehicles who's owners might want to go racing.

 

There was actually a pretty big thread in the lounge a few weeks back by this kid who street races in California. His #1 big reason was that there aren't many tracks in California, and the closest one is something like an hour or more away from him, so its much easier to just street race...but he does it 'safely". Not that I agree with him in any way about that, but it seems that parts of California have a lot of race tracks while it takes a long time to trek to the track for a lot of others. But still, its much "cooler" to street race for a lot of these kids, a lot of them probably wouldn't even take advantage of the track if there were one closer.