A state senator got cited for violating this Pa. traffic law. Now he wants to repeal it

Maintaining that he wasn’t speeding when he crashed his motorcycle in April, state Sen. Mike Regan, R-York, is planning to introduce legislation to repeal a section of the law that resulted in one of two violations related to the incident.

Regan pleaded guilty to two summary offenses of driving an unregistered vehicle and driving at a safe speed, ABC-27 in Harrisburg reported. Despite having two witnesses prepared to testify, he told the Harrisburg-based TV station that he was instructed to plead guilty to both citations.

“To make it easier on my packed schedule, I pleaded guilty,” Regan told ABC-27 in Harrisburg. “However, I’m looking at introducing legislation to remove that provision from the traffic offense code.”

In a Thursday memo to colleagues seeking support for his proposal, Regan said he wanted to strike the exemption of a “driving at a safe speed violation” and include language that would “explicitly state that a driver should not be presumed to be speeding if an accident occurs, and to require a full investigation to determine a driver’s alleged speed.”

He described the section of the law that resulted in his speeding citation as “subjective” for drivers and law enforcement. He added that “in cases like mine, simply because an accident occurred, it was assumed that I was speeding, which was not the case.”

“While my body continues to heal very well, the legal ramifications of being involved in an accident have enlightened me about Pennsylvania’s laws as they pertain to an assumption of speed,” Regan wrote.