Hardly any driver can say they’ve never exceeded the speed limit. Most people do it every day. If they drive 35-miles-per-hour in a 30-miles-per-hour zone, they’re breaking the law. However, a cop that sees them doing it probably won’t ticket them, unless the vehicle also looks suspicious in some way.
Speeding can change your life in an instant if you get too reckless with it, though. Speeding makes loss of vehicular control more likely, and if your car spins off the road or into another lane, you might hit another vehicle, a pedestrian, a cyclist, or some inanimate object.
If that happens, your life can change instantly. Let’s examine that concept in a little more detail.
Why Do People Speed?
First, let’s look at why some people speed. No two people do it for exactly the same reason. However, it happens pretty often. That’s because a lot of people seem to think it’s a victimless crime.
In a very literal sense, they’re often correct. If you speed a little on a local road or the highway and see no negative consequences, you broke the law, but nothing catastrophic occurred. When you begin driving ten or twenty miles over the speed limit rather than five, though, you’re starting to tempt fate a little more.
Some people speed because they’re late for something. Maybe you’re late getting out the door in the morning. You’re on your way to work, and you know that if your boss sees you arriving late, they might reprimand or even fire you.
Some people speed because they like testing their car’s capabilities. If they see that their vehicle can go up to 120-miles-per-hour, they may want to test that. You can’t legally drive anywhere close to that fast, but if a certain kind of person sees an empty straightaway on the highway, maybe they can’t resist flooring the gas pedal.
Some people speed when they drink or consume drugs. These substances might make them reckless. They probably know they should not drink alcohol or use other intoxicants before driving, but they may do it anyway if they like to ignore society’s laws and conventions.
You Might Injure or Even Kill Someone
If you speed, you can injure or even kill someone. Maybe you drive too fast in a school zone and hit some kids crossing the street if you don’t see them in time. On the highway, if you drive too fast, you might hit someone who slams on their brakes ahead of you suddenly.
If you injure or kill someone while driving, or multiple individuals, your life will certainly change, and not for the better. Some drivers compound the problem by fleeing the scene if this happens. It’s the worst thing you can do, but some people panic at that moment.
Assuming you stay on the scene, the police might arrest you. If they allege you exceeded the speed limit and hurt or killed someone, then they may feel that constitutes reckless endangerment.
Legally, they can put you in cuffs and stick you in the back of the squad car. They will also probably administer a breathalyzer test.
You Can Get a Large Fine or Community Service
When you wind up in front of a judge after speeding, they might not throw the book at you if you didn’t injure or kill anyone. A single speeding ticket might not even require a court appearance. If you’ve never done it before, you may just pay the fine through the mail and then try not to speed anymore.
However, if you had multiple speeding tickets or other traffic violations in the past, or if you injured or killed someone, then you will probably have to make a court appearance. You will have to explain to the judge why you acted the way you did.
They might give you a hefty fine. That can sometimes convince some speeders that they should never do it again.
They may also tell you that you must do some community service. You might have to spend some time picking up trash on the side of the highway, cleaning up a local neighborhood, or serving food at a soup kitchen.
You Could Get Jail Time
You could also get some jail time if you sped, especially if you injured or killed someone. If you hurt someone, and you exceed the speed limit by double digits, you might end up facing a decade in jail.
If you killed someone, or multiple people, you might face multiple decades. If you also drank alcohol or ingested other drugs before driving, then you may spend the rest of your life in prison.
A Judge Might Take Your Driver’s License Away
A judge can take your driver’s license as well. That’s obviously not as bad as winding up behind bars, but it’s no picnic.
If you no longer have your driver’s license, then you might have to take public transportation too and from work every day from that point forward. You may have to get a friend or family member to drive you to and from work instead.
You might not like that very much. You lost some of your independence when the judge took your license. They probably felt you endangered the public, though, so they did what they felt served your community best.
Speeding can change your life almost instantaneously, and almost never for the better. Maybe you might feel like you have a valid reason if you’re going into labor or have some other emergency.
Other than that, though, you need to think carefully any time you press down on the gas pedal and exceed the posted speed limit. Even if you feel like you could arrive at work late or something similar, consider the much worse consequences that we’ve laid out.
Some of them will wreck your life or change its course so that it’s almost unrecognizable. In such situations, you can only blame yourself.
