Climbing The Walls

I am completely climbing the walls tonight.

I’ll explain why, but it will take a second, so either throw a pizza in the oven (hi Neil!) and settle down, or else skip along to the next entry.

Our story starts with the Nova Scotia Motor Vehicle Act. Specifically it starts with sections 106A and 285(1).

The first bit there says it’s an offence to speed. It’s the second bit that’s unique to Nova Scotia, and extra special: it says that anyone who speeds more by more than 15km/h (not quite 10mph for my American friends) will automatically get a seven-day license suspension.

While this may seem startlingly draconian to anyone from almost anywhere else in North America, it’s actually intended to be democratizing, rather than excessively punitive. Apparently the rationale is that fine-based speed enforcement allows people with money to flout the law, creating a de facto two-tier system. Of course the points-based approach already levels this out in the long run, but apparently the Nova Scotia legislature felt that since that system would require someone to get several tickets before there were any repercussions more serious than fines, they would enact this short-term suspension as a way of making people with more income drive more slowly from the word go.

This probably works, for the people who know about the law, since I rarely see people in Nova Scotia exceeding the posted speed limits by more than around 10km/h on the highways. I certainly don’t–I am rarely in a hurry these days, and if road conditions are good I tend to just stick my cruise control at 14km/h over the limit when I’m on the highway.

That how I managed my first six years in Nova Scotia without a ticket.

However, highways aren’t the only place where you can exceed the posted speed limit, and Nova Scotia is just full of places where the speed limit is lower than you might expect it to be. For instance, during my six ticketless years I once got a stern warning for driving 75 in a 60 zone (which I narrowly got out of because I had Sarah with me), when I thought it was 80–apparently the single lane highway, which had been 80km/h for the last 30 km suddenly dropped to 60 in this one spot. Purely by coincidence, this spot is where the cop giving out tickets was sitting.

Another nasty spot of this type is where the biggest highway in the province suddenly turns into an urban surface street. At the top of the hill it’s 100km/h, at the bottom it’s 50km/h. The hill is steep enough that cars will actually pick up speed coasting down it.

As you can probably guess, I ran afoul of s106A(b) in this spot. My typical behaviour at this spot had been to do most of my braking at the foot of the hill, which did, in fairness, put me afoul of the posted maxima.

This, however, was in August. So why am I talking about it, at length, in December?

Well, the speeding ticket had a proposed court date on it, at which time I could appear in court and have my actual court date set, if I intended to dispute the ticket. If, on the other hand, I had no intention of disputing the ticket, I could pay the fine any time before the putative court date, and have my seven-day suspension begin on that same “court date”.

Well, it turned out that the date I would appear in court, or have my suspension begin, was two days before my planned family vacation in Ontario. My planned driving vacation in Ontario.

So, my plan was to wait, appear in court, get a court date (presumably after my vacation), thus avoiding the problem of being suspended while I was driving 5000km on vacation. (I am skipping a lengthy part of the story here where I determine that Nova Scotia has no equivalent to POINTTS).

As the October date approached, though, I started to get paranoid about the possibility of the court assigning a trial date during my vacation, or of having to suffer some kind of additional fines/court costs, whatever.

So, a week or so before the date, I made my way down to the court house to have a discussion with the court clerks.

And that’s when I found out that if you just pay the fine before the court date, you can pick the seven days that you will be suspended on. They have to be seven continuous days, but you can set them whenever you want. In fact, when I asked the clerk to see a calendar, she passed to saying “This only goes until March”. This was in October. So clearly they didn’t have a problem with you scheduling it quite far in advance.

Anyway, I picked the week centered around the first weekend in November–I had an out of town guest coming that weekend, and I figured he could be my chauffeur on the weekend, breaking up my seven days of drivinglessness.

The clerk then went on to, in a typically friendly Nova Scotia style, give me her office number and tell me to just call her if I needed to move the suspension week for any reason.

This was the plan until I was required to appear in Boston the first week of November. Since I prefer to drive down there rather than flying, making myself around $700 profit on the mileage allowance, I needed to move the suspension.

Since I knew Trish’s family, including at least three drivers, would be staying with us at Christmas, I called and moved the suspension to the 23rd-30th of December.

And that’s why I am climbing the walls right now.

The first couple of days were no problem, since we had visitors and Christmas celebrations. Friday it was really starting to sting. Today it is positively driving me up the walls–and we did get out for some family stuff today.

Eleven and a half hours and I can drive again.

Man, it will be sweet.