I love reading weird news from the US. If there is a tale of someone eating the world’s biggest hamburger, chatting to Elvis on Twitter or being abducted by aliens I am onto it in a shot.
However, even a veteran of weird news stories like I am can be surprised at times. For example, how can a parked car get caught for speeding?
It happened in the windy city of Chicago and it happened to a Honda Civic owned by a lady called Megan Kasten. She parked her car at the side of a road whose name doesn’t really matter while she met a friend. So far so good. They went to a movie together and the story doesn’t involve any aliens or dead rock stars so far.
Interesting Video Footage
However, a month later she got a speeding ticket through the post. They have a groovy system in Chicago in which the driver can go online and see footage of them being caught red-handed by the city’s new speed cameras. Except in this case, when Megan watched as her Civic sat at the side of the road completely motionless. In other words, it was a parked car. Not a speeding one. Another car whizzed past going in the opposite direction during the footage and presumably this was the speeding vehicle whose license should have been taken down.
The people who run the speed cameras in Chicago say that this was a one off and was down to that favourite catch all phrase “human error”. It seems that the person who reviewed the video footage thought that the parked car was the one which was speeding. The wrongly convicted driver says that she got angry and was “kind of shocked” at this mis-carriage of justice.
Have you ever been wrongfully accused of a motoring offence you didn’t commit?