Florida just made it illegal to crank up the volume while driving. But will it stick? | Bill Cotterell
Florida has a new traffic statue that feels pretty good, if you don’t mind using the force of law against rude behavior.
It is now illegal to drive a car with its stereo system that can be heard 25 feet away. Anywhere near schools, churches or hospitals, the cops can draw the line even closer if your sound is too loud.
The Florida Supreme Court threw out such a statute about 10 years ago. But this year’s legislative session produced a new version which will, inevitably, be challenged in court as an intrusion on personal freedom.
Well, it is. There seems to be a little more to this statute than meets the eye — or, in this case, the ear.
Legislators sometimes say you can’t legislate morality, although many keep trying. You can’t legislate good taste, or common courtesy, either — which is what this law attempts.
It’s partly a generation-gap thing. I’ll admit to feeling an old man’s “You kids get off my lawn” reaction when some rolling jukebox glides up next to me at a red light, with thumping bass and incomprehensible lyrics pulsating at ear-splitting level from the dashboard.
There are bumper stickers saying, “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” OK. We never felt like cranking our 8-tracks up over 100 decibels, but extreme volume wasn’t a thing in my day. (And, incidentally, our music was WAY better.)
And that’s another thing — ever notice that volume is inversely proportional to quality? People never blast PBS or an oldies station.
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Officially, the reason for the statute is that drivers might not be able to hear a police car or ambulance with their sound systems too loud. Emergency vehicles are exempt from the noise law, of course, and so is commercial and political speech.
So. candidates can still put loudspeakers atop their cars and remind everybody to get out and vote, if anybody still does that. Cities can require permits, but the circus could still run a calliope down Main Street when it comes to town.
The new statute directs the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to come up with rules “defining ‘plainly audible’ and establish standards regarding how sound should be measured.”
Civil fines would run $114 or $116, depending where you get caught, and the offense wouldn’t count any points against a driver’s license. That seems expensive enough to get a driver’s attention and discourage repeat offenses, but there’s still a problem of selective enforcement and just plain luck.
Drivers won’t get ticketed for loud sounds on I-10 unless they’re dumb enough to stay beside a trooper with the sound blasting. If a cop is three lanes over or doesn’t want to go to a lot of trouble for a minor annoyance, a scowl and shake of the head might suffice.
But if the cops want to hassle somebody — if they need probable cause to stop somebody — this is a handy judgment call. Civil rights lawyers will be compiling a racial breakdown of drivers getting fined.
The noise is offensive, the musical taste is usually execrable, and the decibel level may even harm a driver’s hearing. But there’s an old Latin dictum, “De minimus non curate Lex” — the law does not concern itself with trifles.
Fining somebody for being an ill-mannered boor seems pretty petty.
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: New Florida law criminalizes loud music while driving. Will it stick?
