Not in California. Painting lines on the road and using a stopwatch is a speed trap and is against the law.
as far as the usefulness of radar detectors, you might want to ask MacTech about his Valentine 1 .
Got me one of these in my work car that also has two antennas beside the trunk. It can also read out my speed. When I drive at the speed limit on the freeway, lots of cars are hesitant to pass me and line up behind me, perhaps more from the antennas than from the dashtop display as they can’t see that until they are beside me or a high-seated driver like a semi or a Stupid Ugly Vehicle is behind me.
I think the argument against a law prohibiting radar detectors is that, once again, a special class of citizens are created in LEOs.
They can use a radar device to attempt to track you, but if you, as a free person use a device which harms no other person, to attempt to “see” this radar tracking you, the state has made it illegal. Something seems wrong with that in a free society.
I will admit that in this day and time, it is a very minor intrusion, and I’m surprised that more states haven’t made radar detectors illegal.
Good. They should be. IMO, we focus too much on speeders in this country and not enough on the real dangers to safety - distracted drivers and crappy drivers. Germany lets everybody go as fast as they want, and they have a lower per capita road fatality rate than we do. Check out David Hough’s “More Proficient Motorcycling” for cites.
No offense, but that thread seems to prove my point. The first encounter Mac mentions the cop would have nailed him had he been speeding. The V1 sounds like a great device for figuring out what a cop is doing once you have spotted the cop, but its the cop you haven’t spotted that’s the problem. All the false positives Mac mentions are another issue - until you’ve memorized where all the false positive sources are in your area, you won’t know the difference between a cop and a convenience store security system. If you know your area well enough to recognize the false positives, odds are you already know where the cops hang out anyway.
I’m sure if you get a high end fuzzbuster, spend a lot of time learning to use it, you might be able to get caught speeding less, but you will still be caught speeding. If you really speed enough to justify the kind of time and financial investment this requires, all it’s going to do is delay the amount of time it takes to get your license suspended by a few months.
The Michigan State Police I worked with couldn’t get certified to use a radar gun until they were already able to accurately guess a driver’s speed within 5 mph without the aid of any devices. Your typical MI cop is not going to keep his radar on, and he won’t even ping each car as it comes down the road. He won’t use his radar at all until he has you in sight, at which point he already has a good idea what speed you’re going. Cross his sites and ping! Yer busted. Once he sees that V1 on your dash, there’s no way he’s going to let you talk your way out of it, either. Those V1s are like advertisements, daring the cops to catch you. And they don’t do crap against lasers.
I was going to suggest simply driving in parts of Michigan as a solution to the radar detector problem. That is, most of the time you don’t really need one, unless you want to drive like a butt-hole. I mean, we’re already doing 80 to 85, and we don’t hesitate to pass the Michigan State Police or the local cops on the freeway, you know, as long as you’re not being a butt hole. The one time I got pulled over for speeding in the last few years, I was let go. I suspect I wasn’t clocked, as I wasn’t speeding (yet) and he just let me go (he asked me if I always drove 90 mph). As far as I can tell, I was being a little aggressive in getting around the slow pokes (there are always some) that feel that it’s their right to impede all lanes of traffic just because they’re going the posted speed. (yeah, yeah, not looking to pick a fight; it’s a prima facie limit, and I stay within the 90% percentile speed, so there). On the other hand, he could have chosen something to bust me with, but just didn’t.
Instant-On (the darling of Eliot PD) was designed to beat radar detectors, if you’re the only one on the road, NO detector will “save” you, the only way a detector works with IO radar is if you use a “rabbit”, a car far enough ahead of you to “draw the fire” of IO radar, you’re picking up the echoes/reflections off the rabbit, a typical IO alert is one or two alert beeps and then silence (the local PD’s in my area use Ka band almost exclusively), so if my V1 chirps once or twice on Ka band, I glance at the arrows to determine the source of the threat and then start my visual scans (after checking my speedo to make sure I’m at or under PSL)
the only problem with this is the V1 is so bloody sensitive that 1.5 to 2 mile IO detections are common, even around corners or below hills, this thing’s amazing
the detector has a slight advantage over the radar gun, in that it only has to detect the outgoing radar beam, the police radar unit has to wait for the beam’s echo to return to determine speed, the actual ticketable range of a radar gun is generally 3/4 mile or less, closer is better, as the driver of the targeted vehicle has less time to react, and the signal is stronger, and since the beam of a radar gun spreads in a cone, much like a flashlight beam, the closer the reading is to the targeted vehicle, there are less chances for the officer to misinterpret the vehicle being measured.
radar and radar operators can make mistakes, radar will return the speed of the most reflective object it encounters, if I’m traveling on a multilane highway in the rightmost lane in my little Saturn Ion, doing the PSL, and a large panel van, truck, or 18-wheeler is passing me, speeding, on the left, the radar gun could;
1; read my vehicle and return an accurate speed (not likely)
2; read the speed of the passing truck, instead of me (most likely)
3; add the speed of both our vehicles together and come up with a whopper of a speed (not likely, but possible, especially with an out-of-tune radar gun)
at this point, the radar gun has done it’s job and read the speed of vehicles passing through it’s cone of detection, the officer now has to determine who was speeding, and how much to ticket them for, does he go after the truck, or me?, bear in mind, I was doing the PSL and the truck was speeding (lets say 15-20 over), it’s possible the officer could misinterpret the speed read from the truck as my speed, BAM!, I get an undeserved ticket that I have to fight in court, as I was NOT speeding
oh, and no, I don’t deliberately speed, and I do find that a detector does make me more observant of my speedometer
A detector is simply a highly specialized radio reciever, nothing more, it should be how it’s used that determines if it’s illegal or not, the detector is a simple inanimate object, nothing more
My understanding is only Virginia and the District of Columbia are only entities that outright ban use of radar detectors with respect to the US of A.
When I worked in Bristol, TN, one of my coworkers decided to turn left on to State Street which put him into Virginia. A cop saw his radar detector and pulled him over. I asked him why he didn’t make a run for it and turn right at the next block back into Tennessee. He told me he was stuck at red light and was blocked from turning, literally inches from “freedom”.
Running from the police over a very minor infraction is rarely a smart choice.
Does jumping juristrictions do you any good?
Speedometers do the same thing.
Care to give it a go?
I wouldn’t have floored it, racing away with no regard for life or limb, but if I was only a block away from Tennesee, I surely would have slowly driven a block and then pulled over while on the TN side and seen if the cop would follow and issue the citation.
I doubt that police are given authorization to cross the state lines for petty traffic infractions. At least that would have raised a lot of crazy issues to use at trial.
Once you’ve been signaled to pull over, failing to pull over is not a petty traffic infraction.
Cops can’t, but radios and cell phones can. What, you don’t think cross-jurisdictional communication exists?
Nah, and nah.
Peace,
mangeorge
The Guardian’s stylebook, for instance, does not all-cap acronyms, only initialisms. Ergo, The Guardian will write: Nasa, Nato, Aids, Unicef, but UNHCR, FBI, etc… All-capping acronyms is only a stylistic convention, not any sort of universal English rule. And acronyms generally fall into normal case once they become perceived as words in their own right, separate from their constituent elements. Ergo, the point that acronyms technically should be capitalized is not true. There’s no universal rule on the matter.
I’m telling you my personal preference. It’s not a proper noun, so I don’t see any reason for it to have any capital letters.
I think English speakers can handle that one through contextual cues. It’s not like it’s the only homonym in the language.
So one would be safe all-capping (is that a word?) all acronyms, eh?
mangeorge
For acronyms these days, I usually distinguish whether something is an agency or an item these days, and whether it could be read as a proper word. FBI is an agency, but it’s also not generally pronounceable as a word, so it gets all caps. UNICEF and NASA aren’t things, they’re agencies, and so I cap 'em. The words radar and scuba are ubiquitous, they’re not agencies, and are pronounceable as words, and so I use them as words. I mean, NASA isn’t “a nasa”; is the National Aeronautics…". While a laser has sustained energy and amplified light and all that, it’s not something you think about when discussing a laser. It’s a just a laser.
New acronyms… any new acronyms from the last few years in wide use to perform an analysis upon?
How so?
-FrL-
Yeah, “all-capping” is a neologism, isn’t English fun?
But, no, you wouldn’t be safe capitalizing all the letters in all acronyms, in my opinion. Consult your style guide. I think most people would object to seeing words like RADAR, LASER, and SCUBA sprinkled through their text, and I would expect pretty much all editors to lowercase those words, even though they are/were, technically, acronyms. So, as I was implying before, there is no single blanket rule in English that governs the capitalization of all acronyms.