Stop sign ticket victory more proof that traffic tickets are beatable, with homework

If you Google "fight traffic ticket Canada," you'll get close to 10 million hits, most of which appear to be lawyers and paralegals who want to help you get out of the citation that's going to dent your wallet and burden your licence with demerit points.

As the penalties for pushing the vehicular envelope increase — rising fines, penalty points that affect insurance premiums — more drivers are reluctant to swallow even justified tickets as a "road tax."

The odds of fighting a ticket and winning are probably long but sometimes if you do your homework, you can walk away victorious.

It takes perseverance, though, and money. Just ask Myron Kinach of Delta, B.C., who thought the ticket he got for failing to stop at a stop sign was unjust.

According to CBC News, Kinach was acquitted in B.C. Supreme Court today after convincing the judge he did indeed stop at the sign before being ticketed for rolling through the white-painted stop line a few feet further on.

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RCMP in Richmond, a suburb just south of Vancouver, had issued a half dozen tickets at the three-way intersection.

Kinach argued he'd obeyed the letter of the law by stopping at the sign, which was 16 feet before the actual stop line, CBC News reported. The judge called that fact vital.

"It is clear that the presence of a stop sign 'at an intersection' is a condition precedent to the legal requirement to stop at the marked stop line," Justice Arne Silverman wrote in his opinion, according to CBC News.

Silverman said his ruling doesn't give drivers free rein to blow through intersections where signs and lines don't match up, but voiding the ticket was the right thing to do in this case.

Kinch admitted challenging the ticket cost much more than the $167 fine.

"It's just mainly the principle . . . I believed I was correct in stopping at the stop sign first," he told CBC News. "Maybe I read too many John Grisham novels — and that's what was behind the thinking I could do this."

Sometimes it helps to be an egghead. Autoblog.com reported earlier this year that University of California physicist Dmitri Krioukov argued his way out of a ticket for blowing a stop sign by using science.

Krioukov entered a four-page physics paper demonstrating differences between linear and angular motion to prove theoretically his Toyota Yaris could have come to a full stop, then moved again in the time it took for a passing vehicle to block the police officer's view of his car.

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Krioukov said the perception of speed can be altered depending on a person's vantage point. Since the cop was looking at Krioukov's car from the side and the physicist contended he stopped quickly before accelerating again just as fast (dubious as the little Yaris is no muscle car), it would have appeared to the officer that he'd never stopped.

The judge acquitted Krioukov and voided the $400 ticket, though whether he bought the scientific treatise or just got a headache trying to grasp it remains unclear.

The key in both cases seems to be to cast enough doubt on the circumstances to weaken the police case.

AOL.com reported a British taxi driver Andrew Constantine was nailed by a speed camera for going 50 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone and fined roughly $100 challenged the accuracy of the electronic watchdog.

His lawyer compared two images from the unit to prove Constantine's actual speed was only 17.8 mph. The cabbie said he distinctly remembered the incident because he was driving an elderly fare and took care to give her a comfortable ride.

But the victory cost him more than $2,500, though Constantine stands to get back up to 75 per cent of that based on his acquital.