I suppose in a perfect we would take money out of the equation and make all fine donated to charitable organizations, but I think there a better chance of Bernie Sanders being elected President.
That’s a weird rule in Colorado. In the jurisdictions that I’ve lived, these kind of maintenance laws require you to have the vehicle fixed, and if you are ticketed, you just go to the police station and have them check it out. It usually involves showing a receipt that you had it done, if they don’t want to go out and look.
It’s a lot more fair, even if it still adds extra work to the person who clearly didn’t intend to break their car.
In Texas there is no such requirement beyond the subjective notion that the crack doesn’t impede your view.
The windshield in my wife’s Honda Fit has been broken for almost two years, a long runner crack on the passenger side the ends very near the bottom of the driver side. We took it to our mechanic who is usually pretty glib about repairs that are pointless. “Why bother?” he asked. “It hurts nothing and will just get broken again.”
Hmmm…one wonders whether the police were “camping the spawn point,” by setting up on the road near the repair shop and pulling over people with broken windshields…
Sucks that the cop was such a stickler, seems like he could have issued a warning instead. Even so, this seems like a non-story. Unless this guy has a rich and colorful history of traffic safety violations, odds are that he can just contest the case in court, show proof that he’s had the windshield fixed, and have the ticket waived.
So a 6 hour sentence in the county courthouse…
Any local jurisdiction I’ve lived in will waive the ticket with proof of repair. Yeah, you have to sit in traffic court, but bring a book and make the most of it.
Is this really news, or more cop bashing?
Sure, that’s the price for driving an unsafe vehicle to a place to have it repaired. It’s not likely he didn’t have alternatives. I find it unlikely that this man lives in a place that is entirely out of the reach of both mobile glass repair services and tow trucks.
Check with your car insurance. Mine covers guys to come out to the house and replace windshields for free. Takes about 30 minutes from them pulling up to to heading out. Their work was perfect, stickers were moved, rear view mirror the whole thing. I was surprised, but as for the “it will get broken again,” does this happen a lot to you?
If this would have happened to me I would have said, “If I wanted to get yelled at for something I am actively trying to fix, I would have stayed married.”
My wife works for the company we have our insurance with, so I know it’s going to cost us a claim. It’s not worth the insurance increase for a new windshield. Also, if I am faced with two orange Fit sports, I can readily tell which one is ours from the back (trailer hitch) or front (broken windshield). It’s funny, but it’s sort of handy…
But yes, I live in the Houston metro area. It happens a lot to most everyone, probably because it gets so hot here that even a small chip can spread quickly and to get anywhere you spend time on the freeway so there’s lots of high-velocity pebbles going around quite a bit of the time. We own three cars, I think between them they’ve had five windshields.
But it wasn’t unsafe. He made it there just fine, and could see well enough to drive.
It is incredibly petty to hand someone a ticket for something they are in the process of fixing. It’s fetishizing the letter of the law over the intent. I’m glad that $46 or at least a half-day of your time is so worthless to you, but to other people it’s a serious hassle. And the important thing to remember is that whether he was given a ticket or not, the safety of him and the people around him were not affected in the least; so why sap society of $46/half-day of this person’s productivity? It seems small, but the reason this is newsworthy is that this kind of petty and useless enforcement happens all the damn time, and totaled up it’s a drag on society, especially the poor.
If this cop is that much of an asshole that he’s going to ruin someone’s day over nothing, then I say he definitely deserves some cop bashing.
Reminds me of the one time I have been pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt. Thankfully that cop let me off with a warning after I explained that I was working on getting the seatbelt fixed, since it had been jammed the night before with pieces of glass from the drivers-side window when someone tried to steal the car (the window was still broken at the time). He still made me prove the belt was jammed before he let me go, however…
Think of it as a palate cleanser; it’s nice every now and again to read about a white guy getting a contestable traffic ticket instead of a black man getting shot to death for no reason at all.
They do this in Camifornia, too. They are colloquially called “fixit tickets”. They are usually simple enough to deal with unless the CHP issues one, then you usually end up going to some far flung location to get it dismissed.
There’s a reason that we don’t let individuals decide what is “safe enough to drive”, and that’s that a great many of us really have no idea. As a result, we have to have black and white definitions of “safe” that can be easily observed. The fact is that in Colorado, driving with a broken windshield that obstructs the driver’s view is a Class A traffic infraction. If this guy was issued a ticket for his windshield, it was likely for this reason, and therefore his car was legally unsafe to operate. He made it to the shop just fine, but fortunately we live in a society where the ends do not justify the means.
Like others have said I’m amazed they don’t have fixit tickets. Just get it fixed and any cop in the state can sign of on it and you either don’t pay or pay a tiny fee. I think here it was like $20, in NYC it was free.
We’ve had 4 rock chips / cracks in our windscreen this year. And one last year. I’m glad we haven’t got it fixed yet.
I’m hoping that we’ve used up our bad luck for a while. Don’t think the windscreen can take too many more 
The auto glass repair shop told the KUSA that they would pay the $46 ticket if the judge didn’t throw it out.
Wow. They win my business, even though it’s a few thousand miles to Colorado.
