Should drivers be able to flash their headlights?

Are flashing headlights a form of free speech? We may soon find out if a lawsuit filed against police agencies by a local attorney prevails. What Oviedo attorney J. Marcus Jones aims to do in a massive class action lawsuit filed this week is to prove that police were in the wrong for ticketing thousands of Florida motorists for flashing their headlights to warn others of speed traps.

His argument is that police are misapplying a law designed to prevent drivers from installing lights on their cars that mimic flashing police car lights.

That’s the law police cite when they hand out $100 tickets to drivers who simply flicked their high beams once or twice to warn drivers of speed traps ahead. In effect, the police are citing drivers for making their cars impersonate police cars when the drivers were attempting to prevent the police from ever having to use theirs.

Jones has done this sort of thing before, fighting individual tickets and winning on an identical premise. And in those cases, judges have universally agreed with him from a legal perspective. Flashing your headlights to get other drivers to slow down to avoid a ticket, the judges found, was not against the law.

But the issue brings up a moral dilemma that goes beyond the law itself: Should motorists be allowed to flash their headlights to warn other drivers of police speed traps ahead?

Almost no other laws in this country are so universally ignored as vehicle speed laws. More than two-thirds of drivers reported that they routinely break speed limits, according to a 2002 Purdue University study. But that seems to have little effect on accident data. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration data showed speeding was a factor in less than 20 percent of accidents.

A study released by a Federal Highway Administration engineer in 1990 showed that seven out of 10 drivers exceeded the speed limit and that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom at the time, the slowest 5 percent of drivers were involved in the most accidents. And motor vehicle collision deaths are at the lowest levels since 1949, according to NHTSA data from 2010, despite a massive increase in cars on the road over the course of those 61 years.

Police have long maintained that ticketing dangerous drivers is done for the sake of safety. They have a point. Despite the heartening statistics mentioned above, car accidents still kill more people aged 3 to 34 than any other cause of death in America.

If you break a traffic law, you’re punished with a citation to negatively reinforce your legally frowned-upon behavior.

But those punishments tend to cost a lot more than the ticket price. Points on your license immediately remove your safe driver rating, which leads to increased insurance costs. If you don’t want the ticket to add points and raise your insurance rates, you have to pay to take a driver improvement course. If you can’t afford to pay the ticket on time, or simply forget, you will at minimum face another fine for being late, and at worst will lose your license and have to pay yet again to have it reinstated.

For drivers who make their living on the road, the result of a momentary lapse of attention to the speedometer can be much more dire, costing them their jobs for receiving a ticket that can raise the price of already far more expensive business liability insurance.

All of that discomfort can be avoided, at least potentially so, by fellow drivers warning you of the speed trap ahead. You still slow down, you still become aware of police presence in the area to hopefully drive more carefully in the future, and you escape the ordeal without a ticket.

Then police can turn their attention elsewhere, such as citing drivers for behavior that contributes to far more accidents, such as following too closely, aggressive driving and running stop signs and red lights.