Speed Trap

a parable

My most transformative experience of 2025, in retrospect, was probably taking a Waymo self-driving taxi ride … in Atlanta.

Yes, I’ve been seeing Waymos and Cruises and Robotaxis periscoping their way around city streets for what feels like years … but always when I visit San Francisco. And you have to understand that San Francisco is not a real place. It is a city-size skunkworks lab/social experiment where they cheerfully roll out things like LIDAR surveillance cameras and stores full of eyeball-scanning orbs just … kind of to see what will happen. You accept this stuff when you go to San Francisco because, again, San Francisco is not a real place.

Atlanta is a real place. It’s just a few hours from my hometown. And a little electric Jaguar SUV-thing tricked out with Waymo cameras tooled me through the construction detours and pedestrian traffic on the 73 different Peachtree Streets of downtown Atlanta, no problem.

Self-driving cars have been a punchline for so long that it’s disorienting to see that all of a sudden they’re here. They’ve breached tech-hub containment and now they’re in normal places where people live. And a lot of people are going to have to update their biases in a big hurry about what this technology can do.

In the meantime, here is a little short story inspired by that Waymo ride:

Speed Trap

Greco? (said my friend); Greco, Indiana? Now that’s a story.

Of course I had been through Greco; everybody has. Been through it, you understand, not to it. Greco was a drive-through town if I ever saw one. Just a wide place on state route 280, about four-and-a-half blocks of turn-of-the-century brick storefront, half of it empty and falling down since they closed the furniture factory–kind of gave you a sad feeling, you know, those boarded-up windows and empty sidewalks, and every now and then you’d see a little stray cat sitting under a bus stop bench, wondering where it all went wrong. It was hard to understand, at first glance, why the place hadn’t folded up altogether and gone back to prairie in about 1980.

And that’s how they’d get you, man. Bam! Right when you were feeling sorry for them. That town didn’t have much going for it, civically speaking, but by God they did have one thing. Greco, Indiana, was the greatest natural speed trap east of the Rocky Mountains.

First of all, route 280 was the connecting link between two major highways, and so if you were trying to get to Chicago from points north and east you really didn’t have any choice. It was Greco or the back roads, so unless you wanted a thirty-minute detour, you had to drive down Main Street. You’d come flying off I-47 after three hours of doing 70 per, then you’ve got a mile and a half of Greco, then you’re back on another interstate. You really had to work hard not to speed through town.

But on top of that, Greco had their town speed limits cranked down as low as legally possible. It was 20 miles per hour when I got caught there, but I think for a while it was actually 15. Fifteen miles per hour! Not to mention the whole town is on this gentle, descending slope. Not a big theatrical hill that makes you pay attention and jam on the brakes. Just a subtle little accelerant, enough to nudge you from 30 to 32 on the speedometer…

And then whoop! Out of nowhere the cop is on you. They would have ‘em waiting in a parking lot that was sunk below the grade of the road, so you never saw ‘em coming. On summer weekends, when vacationers were zipping through all day, they’d have ten, twelve, fifteen patrol cars lined up in that parking lot. Greco hired seasonal traffic cops the way Macy’s hires temps at Christmas. Just clinically efficient. They’d pull you over, slap a two-hundred-and-fifty dollar fine on you, and be back in their lair in less time than it takes to fill up a tank of gas.

Greco had no industry, no commerce, no points of attraction, no natural beauty spots. All they had was this damn speed trap. But that was all they needed. Believe me when I tell you, eighty-six percent of their municipal revenue came from traffic tickets. They had the perfect golden goose out there, and I guess they figured they’d just keep collecting its eggs in their one basket until the end of time.

But then the self-driving cars showed up.

I mean. You talk about a meteor shower coming for the dinosaurs. At first it was just a smattering, you know, one or two a day, enough to point and laugh at. But you know how technology goes. One summer a self-driving car is something to exclaim over, the next year you can’t count ‘em, and by the year after that it’s the human drivers who catch you by surprise.

To their credit, Greco realized what the danger was. They tried early to ban self-driving cars from town entirely. That didn’t hold up in court, of course. What were they supposed to say–that the cars were making the town too safe? They couldn’t very well make their real complaint, which was that they had built their whole economy around the reliable imperfection of human drivers, and suddenly that human element was just … gone. Replaced by an orderly little line of crossover SUVs with LIDAR sensors that always knew exactly what the speed limit was.

When the speeding tickets started drying up, that’s when the town council really got scared. They fought back any way they knew how.

They tried obscuring the speed limit signs with branches to confuse the car sensors. Contradictory signage, confusing lane stripes, all that adversarial crap. But the cars were pretty hard to outsmart, and got smarter all the time. There was even talk of clawing back the lost money by making Main Street a toll road–but because it was technically a state route, they didn’t have authority. Meanwhile the speeding ticket revenue dropped…and dropped…and dropped. They had to lay off all those seasonal cops. For awhile they were down to just one patrolwoman, and her job wasn’t looking so safe. They could barely pay for trash removal, couldn’t pay at all for streetlights. The future of Greco as a going concern looked pretty short.

But then a funny thing happened.

On the way to bankruptcy, the town of Greco somehow found a new source of income. One night the streetlights came back on, and stayed on. That one patrolwoman–she didn’t get fired. She got promoted. And then the town hired another, and another. The next year they broke ground on a brand new police station. The year after that, while the self-driving cars kept chugging through town, Greco somehow found money to buy their SWAT team two tanks and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

I’m no expert, and I haven’t seen the books, but it sure looks to me like they’re raking in more money than they did in the glory days before the self-driving cars showed up.

The question is how? They haven’t changed anything. They haven’t raised or lowered the speed limit. They aren’t bothering to obfuscate the road signage anymore. It’s just this dead little town full of perfectly-behaved thru-traffic, with the richest police department of its size in the world.

How are they doing it? I don’t know and I wouldn’t presume to say.

But I do know this: it’s a little nerve-racking at first to ride in a self-driving car, but pretty soon you just stop thinking about it. The thing is so reliable, so safe, so smooth, that you learn to let it handle the road for you. You curl up in the backseat with your phone or a good book, or maybe you drift off to sleep, and you just forget about the world outside until you come to a stop.

Until one day the car comes to a stop in a tiny town somewhere between Detroit and Chicago, a place you’ve never been and don’t know the name of–just a little bypass between two highways. The car has pulled itself over like a good little autonomous vehicle because of the blue flashing lights behind it.

A friendly policewoman taps on your window–the back window–and when you roll it down she says: “Do you know how fast you were going?”

And of course you don’t know. You don’t have any idea. You say: “I’m sure I was going the speed limit.”

She shakes her head and says: “It’s 20 through here, I had you at 32. Can I see your license and registration, please?”

Now, maybe you are pretty convinced that you weren’t going 32. Maybe you look through your car’s data history and confirm it, though I bet you don’t know how to do that. Maybe you vow to come back in six weeks to this nowhere town, in your car with the out-of-state plates, and fight the ticket in court.

Maybe, if you give off a convincing vibe that you’re thinking of fighting, the police officer might generously knock your ticket down to an “equipment malfunction” so that you’re only out eighty bucks, with no points added to your license. There’s no way you’re coming all the way back to fight that. You’ll pay it and move on.

Either way, the point is that in that crucial moment when the officer rolls down the window and asks how fast you were going–you’re not quite sure. And that little moment of doubt, repeated over thousands of traffic stops…it might, just maybe, be worth big money.

I’m not saying that’s what’s happening in Greco, Indiana. But I advise that if you do find your self-driving car taking the Greco exit on I-47 this summer…even though the place looks deserted and the buildings are falling down…look out for that shiny new police headquarters set back from the main road. And keep a close eye on your speedometer. The self-driving car can only take you so far.

Cartoon of the day

This should clear everything up: