Re: LASER + PHOTO RADAR License plate cover

A pellet gun.

Buying a new car and driving through before your plates arrive in the mail (works great for tollbooths, too).

Not around here. California Highway Patrol are always checking for carpool cheats on our toll bridges, and I'm sure the toll booth operators have a way of alerting them.

Just fight the ticket in court. Your local DA will probably dismiss the charge when push comes to shove. First line of defense is to have the camera in question impounded for calibration. This will remove the income producing device temporarily at least. Since most folks just mail in the fines and never question the machine its removal will cause some consternation with the authorities. If the machine proves to be as little as .1 mph off it may be assumed to be behaving improperly. Chances are the DA would rather dismiss your one charge than have to drop several hundred.

Here's what works in Maryland as long as you do not have a loan on your car. (This won't work if you have a loan because most lenders won't let you title a car in the name of a trust.)

First, create a Revocable Living Trust with the Nolo Willmaker Plus software

For the name of the trust, use something obscure, like "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust". Don't use your own name as part of the trust name. (It is perfectly legal to name your living trust anything that you want; you don't have to name it using your name.) Make yourself the trustee. Make your wife or best friend the beneficiary (that's the person who gets the car if you die.) The Nolo software explains all this in simple terms. List your cars as being owned by the living trust. Then go to the MVA and have your cars retitled and reregistered under the name of the living trust. Take the title for your car with you. Be sure to take the trust document with you, as the MVA clerk will need to copy a few pages of the trust. The cost to put a car in the trust is $27 per car. There is no transfer tax, since you are transferring the cars to a trust for which you are the trustee. Creating the living trust and putting just your cars in it is not really that difficult. Total time including waiting at the MVA office for this part of the project is about 3 hours.

Now you are protected, but you need to use the protection when your car gets a red light ticket.

When you get a red light ticket, the defendent will be listed as the name of the trust, for example, "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust". (By the way, the ticket won't be associated with your driver's license number because you'll get a "Z" ID code for your license number which won't correlate with your driver's license number, but that's not even that important.) When you go to court to defend the ticket, the judge will ask you to plead. Don't plead, but instead, simply make the following pretrial motion:

"Your honor, I wish to make a pretrial motion. The red light citation is the charging document, and the party listed as the defendent is the Gamma Revocable Living Trust. There is no such person as the Gamma Revocable Living Trust, so I make a motion that the case be dismissed as only a person can be charged."

If the judge asks who was driving, just say that you don't know, and you are just appearing because you are the trustee of the trust that owns the car.

The judge will then dismiss the case.

This works perfectly every time in Maryland. I suspect that it will work virtually everywhere. If enough people do this, they might enhance the system so that the MVA puts the name of the trustee in the registration system so that the trustee can be charged, but that's probably a very, very long way off.

Enjoy!