This is odd. The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that a rental car company’s policy of tracking customer speeds via GPS and issuing fines for exceeding 79 mph is illegal. The state took the company to court Attorney General Richard Blumenthal:

“You cannot secretly track drivers’ speeds and gouge them under the guise of safety or vehicle expense. No logic or law warrants a private company ambushing consumers with a $150 fee for exceeding a random speed limit.”

Remarkable how quickly state officials will jump on private companies for doing what states do all the time. The court ruled the policy to be illegal regardless of how clear it made the policy in the rental contract.

As you might guess, I have no problem with the Connecticut rental car company’s policy, so long as it’s pretty clear up front what that policy is. I just wish our elected officials were as concerned with the way states “ambush” motorists with “random speed limits” under the “guise of safety” as they are with private companies who enter into voluntary contracts with their customers.

Keep an eye on Connecticut. Traffic cameras have alread been suggested by at least one government official there. My guess is that the state will soon give in to the revenue temptation cameras offer. It’ll be interesting to see if the attorney general and state Supreme Court are as vigilant about the rights of motorists when they’re being abrogated by the state as they are about a private corporation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 5:20 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.