Now I Know More (7 page)

The court agreed.

So every month, each member of Congress receives a plain manila envelope in the mail containing a few dozen pages of satire, political commentary, and naked women. Most offices file the magazines immediately into the recycling bin. But as one congressional staffer anonymously told
National Journal
, some magazines have been put to a different, arguably better use:

But yeah, most just throw them out.

In the United States, people drive on the right side of the road. To make driving and turning easier, the driver usually sits on the left side of the car, placing him or her closer to the center of traffic. There is, however, one notable exception to that latter rule. Mail carriers, in most cases, sit in the right side of their mail trucks—they have to be on the curb side of the vehicle in order to reach mailboxes without having to exit. This feature alone makes mail trucks unique among American motor vehicles. But the differences don't stop there. The white box-shaped trucks you see slowly tootling around the neighborhood have gone through a testing process unlike any other in the area.

The door-to-door mail truck most commonly in use today is called the Grumman LLV, short for Long-Life Vehicle. It was created in the 1980s and is the first vehicle specifically created for the U.S. Postal Service—prior to the LLV, the post office purchased all sorts of available vehicles (often military or government surplus) and repurposed them to serve mail carriers as well as possible. However, the driving needs of a postal truck are much different than almost all other cars out there, so the Postal Service and Grumman worked on a prototype in 1985 to meet those needs.

The tests were rigorous and tedious—as well as bumpy. According to the Smithsonian Institute, the prototypes were subjected to tests that would make most people incredibly carsick. Prototypes had to drive over 2,800 miles while stopping every 250 feet (simulating a whole lot of mailbox deliveries)—that's roughly the equivalent of driving from New York to Los Angeles while stopping more than 60,000 times. The trucks also had to drive more than 10,000 miles over gravel roads at speeds of thirty to forty-five mph and another 1,000 miles over three- to four-inch-high cobblestones, albeit at only ten to fifteen miles per hour. Then there were the potholes: Each of the prototypes' four wheels had to hit at least 35,000 test potholes, often while travelling ten to fifteen miles per hour.

The LLVs are made of corrosion-resistant aluminum and therefore rarely rust. Most cars are made from steel, which is cheaper, but then most cars aren't intended to last as long as mail trucks. Grumman began producing the LLVs in 1987, meeting the U.S. Postal Service's order of 100,000 to 140,000 vehicles (reports vary) within a few years. As it turned out, the Long Life Vehicles really have had long lives. Even though these trucks are still commonly seen in cities and suburbs throughout the United States, Grumman stopped production of them in 1994, meaning that even the newest LLV is two decades old.

The LLVs will be retired soon, though. Not because they no longer work or are too expensive to maintain, but because of environmental concerns. Like most cars of the 1980s and 1990s, they aren't very fuel efficient and will likely be replaced by hybrids or full-electric models over time.

If you ask Google Maps how long it will take you to go from New York City to the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, California, you'll find out that the 2,800-mile trip will take you roughly forty-four hours by car. That's nonstop—no allowances for sleep, meals, bathroom breaks, or even refueling, and certainly no sightseeing. For the vast majority of us, that forty-four-hour estimate for any such cross-country trip is entirely meaningless. We'd take it slow, spreading the trip over at least four days, probably closer to six. We'd stop often along the way, making the trip part of the adventure itself.

For Ed Bolian, the forty-four-hour estimate is similarly meaningless, but for the exact opposite reason. He wanted to get from Manhattan to Redondo Beach is much less time. Two-thirds of the time, in fact.

In 1933, a man named Edwin Baker—“Cannonball” Baker as he'd later become known—made the New York to Los Angeles trip in roughly fifty-three and a half hours, easily a record at the time. (The interstate highway system hadn't been built yet, so Baker's fifty-mile-per-hour average speed was accomplished on county roads and unpaved thoroughfares.) Forty years later, that record still stood. It might have become a small piece of American folklore, mostly forgotten. However, when the 1973 oil crisis hit the American economy, Baker's trip returned to the public eye. The oil shortage led to the creation of a national minimum-speed law of fifty-five miles per hour in hopes of curtailing oil use. In protest, a group of car aficionados organized “Cannonball Run,” a cross-country race, as reported by ABC News.

Cannonball Run (which inspired the 1981 movie of the same name) didn't require race organizers or the like—participants just needed to drive from Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in the Los Angeles area and keep verifiable track of the time. Over the past forty or so years, Baker's record has been replaced many times over. In 1983, two men made the trip in thirty-two hours and seven minutes in a Ferrari 308. That mark stood until 2006, when a guy named Alex Roy led a team that did the trip in thirty-one hours and seven minutes.

Bolian smashed that time.

His attempt in 2013 began a year and a half earlier with the purchase of a Mercedes CL55 AMG. As Jalopnik reported, the car was a good starting point but needed work to make a clearly illegal road trip in record time. First, Bolian added two twenty-two-gallon gas tanks, nearly tripling the car's standard capacity, and a pair of GPS units to make sure he knew where he was at all times. (If one failed, he had a backup.) Most of the work was done to avoid the authorities. The car had multiple iPhone and iPad chargers, allowing for the use of speed trap-dodging apps; a pair of laser jammers (the radar jammer he ordered wasn't finished in time), a kill switch for the rear lights, and three radar detectors. He also added a CB radio so he could ask trucks to slow down in order to pass them—masquerading, via radio, as a trucker himself.

He didn't make the trip alone, of course. He had a codriver, whom he recruited only a few weeks before the run, and a spotter in the back seat—his job was to watch for cops and calculate fuel needs—who joined the team just days before the record-breaking attempt. On October 19, 2013, the trio left Manhattan . . .

. . . and promptly got stuck in traffic. It took fifteen minutes to get off the island.

Nevertheless, it was basically smooth sailing from there on out. Over the next twenty-eight hours and change, the trio sped their way to the greater Los Angeles area, averaging—averaging!—ninety-eight miles per hour the entire time. Yes, that includes gas and bathroom breaks.

Speeding may earn you a ticket. In most cases, it will cost you maybe $150 in America or 100 Euros in Europe. For many people, that could be the difference between making this month's rent and being in arrears. For others, it's barely noticeable.

So Finland tried to fix it. Which is why, in 2001, Finland fined Anssi Vanjoki, a high-paid Nokia executive, more than $100,000 for driving seventy-five kilometers per hour (forty-seven miles per hour) in a fifty-kph (thirty-one-mph) zone.

In 1921, Finland adopted a “day-fine” law, which aimed to apply the ecumenical effect of incarceration to petty violations such as littering and minor traffic violations. Finland noted that jail time hit the rich and poor roughly equally; for each day in prison, the convict lost a day of freedom, whether rich or poor. Fines, the government concluded, should follow a similar framework. Since that year, those infractions can cost a violator a whole day's pay—be it fifty Euros or 50,000 Euros. And unlike other countries with day-fine laws, Finland has no maximum fine amounts.

As reported by the BBC, for Vanjoki, this meant a bill of 116,000 Euros (at the time, about $103,000). In October 2001, he was riding his motorcycle fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit and, when caught, was given a fine equal to fourteen days of his annual income, which is how the day-fine system should work. But Vanjoki's case had an odd wrinkle—it was based on his income for the 1999 filing year, which was much higher than typical. Vanjoki appealed the fine, arguing that in 1999 he sold a number of stock options, boosting his income tremendously. By 2001 he was making significantly less money because his equity stake in Nokia was worth much less. The courts agreed with him and cut his fine by 95 percent.

While the day-fine system seems more fair than the typical flat-fine system most of the world uses, it has found its critics. England and Wales tried it in the early 1990s, but it was generally disliked due to the difference between fines. (The BBC noted one example of two men ticketed for fighting each other; the fine levied on the richer of the two was ten times that of the poorer.) In 2002, American economist Steven Landsburgh took to the
Wall Street Journal
to assail the scheme by pointing out an absurd result: “If Mr. Vanjoki speeds while his chauffeur rides in the passenger seat, the price is $100,000. If they switch seats, the price drops to $50.”