5 ms·

It still amazes me that the US, with all its red light cameras, doesn't adopt the European speed cameras that create a lot of tickets (at significant fines) for

by blunte 6y ago

It still amazes me that the US, with all its red light cameras, doesn't adopt the European speed cameras that create a lot of tickets (at significant fines) for relatively minor speeding infractions. Top Gear did a test years ago to see just how fast you would need to go to defeat a speed camera, and it was well beyond what the Cannonballers would be running. You just can't fool a high speed camera easily. Of course, you can black out your drivers license, but you'll still risk the human patrols. On the other hand, if the roads are empty, and nobody gets hurt... who cares! Film it, please.

sandworm101 6y ago
>> You just can't fool a high speed camera easily. There are some tricks. If you have staff, people prepping the road ahead of you, then you just slow down for the cameras. I suspect that these recent records are being supported by the same people, the same camera/cop location data. I'm interested in what tech might be used by this team. I've been waiting for SDR dongles to transform into radar detectors/jammers. Cop cars emit so many different dedicated frequencies that anyone with a dongle and a laptop should be able to build a very functional "copdar".
- denlekke 6y ago
  maybe not what the above commenter meant but some euro speed camera systems compare pictures and the time they were taken from multiple cameras to get average speed. so imagine a camera that logs every on and off ramp of i-80 and if you the times you enter and exit indicate an average speed above the speed limit, you get a ticket.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    If you know where those are, you just don't let them read your plate. There are products out there that can turn your license plate "off" with the flick of a switch. But if you are modifying car for a cannonball run you can build one yourself. Google "smart glass". Remember too that many US states do not require front plates. So it is not unusual for a car to be seen without one, leaving only the rear plate to worry about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AVojj7rJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AVojj7rJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ6rLhkZ3Hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ6rLhkZ3Hg And here is one on a lambo being prepped for a run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUgxSizDRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUgxSizDRQ
    - joezydeco 6y ago
      Lots of states are aware of active/passive plate obsfucation systems and make covering the plate with any material an illegal act. The only thing that seems legal is letting your plate 'degrade' with corrosion to the point where the automated readers can't make out the characters.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  If you're doing a cannonball run you don't slow down for cameras. That's wasted time and the tickets come later anyway. You only slow down for actual cops, because they could end your run.
- madengr 6y ago
  I built a radar jammer, when in college, back in the 90’s. The issue is you end up setting off other people’s radar detectors, which just slows down traffic. Most police traffic is on a trunked radio system shared with other users, and is typically encrypted. It’s easy find the transmission with a scanner, but trying to localize a transmission using only a power measurement is difficult due to multipath and fading.
driverdan 6y ago
It's because speed cameras are a scam, don't hold up in court. You have to prove who was driving and speed cameras typically can't do that.
- echelon 6y ago
  You could flag the most egregious violators in real time and send a police interceptor. That would enable us to shift more highway patrol into other roles.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> and send a police interceptor. Lol. No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. Even if they could match the raw speed, catching up would take hours. You could organize a roadblock ahead but US cops, the local boys doing highway patrol in the dead of night, aren't going to deploy all those resources to maybe catch a speeder. This happened to a friend of mine on a motorcyle. He was doing over 250KM/hour at 3am on a tuesday, flying back towards Vancouver for an emergency work thing. The first cop attempted to catch him, so did the second a few exits later. By the time they accelerated to highway speeds he was over the horizon. When he eventually hit a "roadblock" (one cop car he could easily have outrun) he had covered almost 60km. He honestly never saw the first two cops. At those speeds you don't bother with mirror checks. Judge found no streetracing or evading police. Simple (big) speeding ticket.
    - DrScump 6y ago
      No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. "Nothin' outruns my Motorola."
chiph 6y ago
Hennessey (with permission of the Texas Department of Public Safety) ran 203 mph (325 kph) on SH-130 outside of Austin to "test" the electronic toll collectors. The toll transponder was successfully read at 170 mph, and the radar in the patrol car clocked the Camaro at 203 (that's one ticket you wouldn't be able to talk your way out of) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJ3w_fAdoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJ3w_fAdoI Tourist note: This is the road that runs past the Circuit of the Americas F1 track. And Lockhart has some of the best BBQ in central Texas.
madengr 6y ago
The US doesn’t have a lot of red light cameras. The ones that they do have are usually privately owned and administered. The owners puts them in for free and gets a cut of the fines. Now that’s American.
ggreer 6y ago
Americans tend to vandalize speed cameras. As long as repairing/replacing the cameras costs more than the revenue they generate from tickets, they’re not worth deploying.
- kelsolaar 6y ago
  Same happens in France and they are still around :)
- Doxin 6y ago
  Same happens in the netherlands. A favorite method here is to fill the camera with expanding foam which basically makes the camera take part in a slow-motion explosion. Another (less damaging) method I've seen is simply wrapping the camera in cling wrap, making the image terribly fuzzy but not destroying anything in the process. AFAIK over here speed cameras are only allowed to be placed if they demonstratively improve traffic safety, so we don't have a crazy amount of them. Of course the best way to beat a speed camera is to not speed ;-)
jwalton 6y ago
This was a good and amusing article from a law professor about some of the problems with speed cameras in America: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/ https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/
unethical_ban 6y ago
When red light cams were introduced, they sucked, did a lot of false positives for things like doing a 1mph rolling stop for a right turn at a dead intersection, etc. If you haven't seen the reluctance/defiance of American culture with the coronavirus pandemic, well... for better and worse, we don't like being surveilled by the government. Or at least, we like them to do us the honor of masking it or pretending not to.
dahart 6y ago
I wish we would adopt automatic ticketing for speeding. It’s been tried in some places near me and there was public outcry about privacy issues. I don’t know what they are exactly, I believe there is no reasonable expectation of privacy while driving on public roads, especially when you’re breaking the law, nonetheless it seems to be working to prevent photo ticketing. It was super interesting driving a rental car in Iceland last year. They have automatic speed cameras & ticketing. And we didn’t ask for it, but the rental car’s computer knew where they were and beeped every time we approached one.

by blunte 6y ago

sandworm101 6y ago

>> You just can't fool a high speed camera easily. There are some tricks. If you have staff, people prepping the road ahead of you, then you just slow down for the cameras. I suspect that these recent records are being supported by the same people, the same camera/cop location data. I'm interested in what tech might be used by this team. I've been waiting for SDR dongles to transform into radar detectors/jammers. Cop cars emit so many different dedicated frequencies that anyone with a dongle and a laptop should be able to build a very functional "copdar".

denlekke 6y ago
maybe not what the above commenter meant but some euro speed camera systems compare pictures and the time they were taken from multiple cameras to get average speed. so imagine a camera that logs every on and off ramp of i-80 and if you the times you enter and exit indicate an average speed above the speed limit, you get a ticket.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  If you know where those are, you just don't let them read your plate. There are products out there that can turn your license plate "off" with the flick of a switch. But if you are modifying car for a cannonball run you can build one yourself. Google "smart glass". Remember too that many US states do not require front plates. So it is not unusual for a car to be seen without one, leaving only the rear plate to worry about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AVojj7rJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AVojj7rJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ6rLhkZ3Hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ6rLhkZ3Hg And here is one on a lambo being prepped for a run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUgxSizDRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUgxSizDRQ
  - joezydeco 6y ago
    Lots of states are aware of active/passive plate obsfucation systems and make covering the plate with any material an illegal act. The only thing that seems legal is letting your plate 'degrade' with corrosion to the point where the automated readers can't make out the characters.
CydeWeys 6y ago
If you're doing a cannonball run you don't slow down for cameras. That's wasted time and the tickets come later anyway. You only slow down for actual cops, because they could end your run.
madengr 6y ago
I built a radar jammer, when in college, back in the 90’s. The issue is you end up setting off other people’s radar detectors, which just slows down traffic. Most police traffic is on a trunked radio system shared with other users, and is typically encrypted. It’s easy find the transmission with a scanner, but trying to localize a transmission using only a power measurement is difficult due to multipath and fading.

driverdan 6y ago

It's because speed cameras are a scam, don't hold up in court. You have to prove who was driving and speed cameras typically can't do that.

echelon 6y ago
You could flag the most egregious violators in real time and send a police interceptor. That would enable us to shift more highway patrol into other roles.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> and send a police interceptor. Lol. No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. Even if they could match the raw speed, catching up would take hours. You could organize a roadblock ahead but US cops, the local boys doing highway patrol in the dead of night, aren't going to deploy all those resources to maybe catch a speeder. This happened to a friend of mine on a motorcyle. He was doing over 250KM/hour at 3am on a tuesday, flying back towards Vancouver for an emergency work thing. The first cop attempted to catch him, so did the second a few exits later. By the time they accelerated to highway speeds he was over the horizon. When he eventually hit a "roadblock" (one cop car he could easily have outrun) he had covered almost 60km. He honestly never saw the first two cops. At those speeds you don't bother with mirror checks. Judge found no streetracing or evading police. Simple (big) speeding ticket.
  - DrScump 6y ago
    No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. "Nothin' outruns my Motorola."

chiph 6y ago

Hennessey (with permission of the Texas Department of Public Safety) ran 203 mph (325 kph) on SH-130 outside of Austin to "test" the electronic toll collectors. The toll transponder was successfully read at 170 mph, and the radar in the patrol car clocked the Camaro at 203 (that's one ticket you wouldn't be able to talk your way out of) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJ3w_fAdoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJ3w_fAdoI Tourist note: This is the road that runs past the Circuit of the Americas F1 track. And Lockhart has some of the best BBQ in central Texas.

madengr 6y ago

The US doesn’t have a lot of red light cameras. The ones that they do have are usually privately owned and administered. The owners puts them in for free and gets a cut of the fines. Now that’s American.

ggreer 6y ago

Americans tend to vandalize speed cameras. As long as repairing/replacing the cameras costs more than the revenue they generate from tickets, they’re not worth deploying.

kelsolaar 6y ago
Same happens in France and they are still around :)
Doxin 6y ago
Same happens in the netherlands. A favorite method here is to fill the camera with expanding foam which basically makes the camera take part in a slow-motion explosion. Another (less damaging) method I've seen is simply wrapping the camera in cling wrap, making the image terribly fuzzy but not destroying anything in the process. AFAIK over here speed cameras are only allowed to be placed if they demonstratively improve traffic safety, so we don't have a crazy amount of them. Of course the best way to beat a speed camera is to not speed ;-)

jwalton 6y ago

This was a good and amusing article from a law professor about some of the problems with speed cameras in America: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/ https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/

unethical_ban 6y ago

When red light cams were introduced, they sucked, did a lot of false positives for things like doing a 1mph rolling stop for a right turn at a dead intersection, etc. If you haven't seen the reluctance/defiance of American culture with the coronavirus pandemic, well... for better and worse, we don't like being surveilled by the government. Or at least, we like them to do us the honor of masking it or pretending not to.

dahart 6y ago

I wish we would adopt automatic ticketing for speeding. It’s been tried in some places near me and there was public outcry about privacy issues. I don’t know what they are exactly, I believe there is no reasonable expectation of privacy while driving on public roads, especially when you’re breaking the law, nonetheless it seems to be working to prevent photo ticketing. It was super interesting driving a rental car in Iceland last year. They have automatic speed cameras & ticketing. And we didn’t ask for it, but the rental car’s computer knew where they were and beeped every time we approached one.