While driving on interstate highways in the Midwest, I’ve occasionally seen white markings painted on the highway that look like simple pictographs of airplanes. These are always perfectly centered and professionally applied, so I figure they couldn’t be vandalism. The “planes” are always oriented in the direction of traffic.
What’s up with these? The only theory I can come up with is that they’re some kind of a signal to pilots – but a signal of what? That they should feel free to use the highway as a landing strip in a pinch?
I haven’t seen these in a while in my state. But back when I did they were official markings that meant “Speed monitored by aircraft.” They were intended to get people to follow the speed limit.
That’s interesting. I’ve often seen signs that say “Speed monitored by aircraft,” and it always struck me as an empty threat. I can’t imagine that any state would go to the considerable expense of having aircraft fly around just to watch for speeders.
I’ve also noticed that the signs tend to be positioned right after you cross a state line. The implication is “Never mind what you got away with in the loser state you just left – in THIS state we don’t tolerate speeders.”
South Dakota Highway Patrol Air Unit
A cursory check reveals from the above links report aircraft are used to catch speeders as well as others breaking the law. As for the news article, “It’s a way to keep our troopers safe.”
Yep, they do it…I have the dent in my bank account to prove it. Got nailed a few years ago on my way to work on I-275 in Cincinnati. I’ve never seen a sign indicating they monitored by air. Maybe it was some sort of test program or something.
They are out there. I got nabbed by one in NH on my way up north to go camping one Summer Monday morning. (Avoiding the tourist rushes by camping mid-week)
In paragraph 4, it mentions that the interstate system was designed so that one mile in every five must be straight, usable as airstrips, in times of war or other emergencies.
The airplane icons are mileage markers for speed/time/distance computation, intended for use by police in aircraft (hence the shape). They are spaced a specific distance apart (note there are always at least two in a given direction). The police know the distance between them, measure your time to go from one to the other, and calculate your speed. The airplane observers then radio info on violators to patrol cars waiting below.
As GaryT observed, they are frequently used as “measured mile” (or quarter mile) indicators to allow planes to calculate cars’ speeds. In areas where the country is mostly flat, they are actually a fairly economical way to patrol as a lot of roads will run parallel and an aircraft observer can watch more than one road at a time.
This was the big thing here in New South Wales, back in the late 80s. There’d be a sign by the side of the road warning of aerial patrols, and two white lines painted across the road a certain distance apart for the aircraft to take readings against.
I remember there was an outcry at the time about the eye-in-the-sky Orwellian overtones of all this. In any event, I never saw a police aircraft, and eventually the signs and white lines quietly disappeared. Now it’s all speed cameras.
You are correct, of course, but what I don’t understand is how a citation issued by the officer in the car (based on a radioed report from an airborne officer) can hold up in court. I thought that a citation could only be issued by the officer who actually observed the violation.
One might also suspect that states that employ aerial speed control have tailored their laws to make tag-team-ticketing legal.
Even the basis of the claim that a ticketing officer must have observed the infraction is suspect. I suspect that that claim was invented by officers who have been called to the scene of an accident after the fact who wanted to avoid getting called in to testify in later prolonged court cases (where they might not get their overtime). In Ohio, I know one woman who was forced into a ditch by a driver crossing the centerline whom the arriving officer told that he could not issue a ticket because he had not witnessed the event. On a later occasion, she was cited by another officer for letting her vehicle roll backwards into the car behind her at a traffic light after the following car rear-ended her, even though there were no witnesses (and certainly no police witnesses) to the event. (Interestingly, the other driver in each case lived in the city where the event occurred while the woman was from “out of town.”)