I live in VA, and as of July 1 it is legal to check speed by aircraft in this fine state. There’s signs all over the highways, and white lines intersecting the roads exactly 1/4-mile apart.
My question isn’t on how they do it, but the money aspects of it? I would think it’d be waaaay too expensive to justify sending a plane up to ticket people below, when speed traps work just as well, one would think – and also serve as a visible deterrent and slow people down.
Does anyone here have any specific knowledge of the reasoning behind this? Do they make enough money to cover the cost? Has anyone received a ticket from an airplane (and for that matter, do they simply photograph your plate and mail the ticket to you, or do they alert troopers up ahead?)? It just seems to be that the cost would be much too great to justify, and this is more of an additional thing for drivers to think about when the decide whether or not to speed. Anyone?
From what I hear, VASCAR (Visual Average Speed Computer And Recorder) tickets are relatively easy to beat. The guy who pull you over and tickets you isn’t the one who verified your speed, the guy in the plane has to show up in court if you fight it,
Yes, it really is checked. I’ve been ticketed on I-64 and the trooper told me that I had been clocked by a helicopter. The trooper in the sky clocks you and radios to a trooper on the ground - “Red pickup truck going eastbound on I-64 at mile marker X was clocked doing 75 mph. Travelling in left lane, etc. etc. etc.” You pass the car on the ground, lights start to blink, you know the drill.
On the way down to Norfolk last weekend, we saw the “Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft” sign and all agreed that it should mean they use, like, F-14s and let loose a couple of heat-seeking missiles on your ass.
If you think about it, sending the plane up there when there is no traffic, then it would be a waste, you wouldn’t catch too many people. But if you do it on a major holiday… then you are in business. I know personally of one person three years back that got a ticket because of it, he thought it was BS cause 'How was he supposed to see the helicopter/airplane"
A book I read a while back titled (I think) A Speeder’s Guide to Avoiding Ticks said that it is really done, but only rarely. Most jurisdictions don’t have money in the budget for a big undertaking like that unless they get a grant from the Federal government.
They use a small airplane here in Iowa. They ticket a lot of vehicles too.Highway 61 and highway 218 are both north south highways and are only about 30 miles apart in this part of the state. One plane can hop back and forth many times a day.
Hint use your scanner.
BTW I have a technical paper on how VASCAR works, somewhere, Hav’nt seen it in years or I would look it up.IIRC it is a radar type system and it’s close to 30 years old. I wouldn’t think it would be very effective today.
I always thought they used a stopwatch.
Gee the acronym must have either have been dropped for the one I know or it has been improved on in the last 30 years. IIRC the paper explained Doppler effect
Because VASCAR can be used in both planes and squade cars (almost all Wisconsin State Patrol cars have it) you’ll need something beter than a radar detector.
That something is the Uniden Bear Tracker. It’s a neat little preprogrammed scanner, the same size as a radar detector. This device has a “mobile rpeater detector”.
It detects the repeater state police squad cars use for their radios. When it detects a state cops radio, it sounds an alarm. Unlike radar and vascar, troopers don’t turn their radios off! I’ve had this thing for over 4 years and it works like a charm. 3 mile range too! And it also picks up aircraft transmissions if you want to listed in to those.
It has 2 seperate volume controls in case you only want the alarm funtion and not listen to cops yaking to one another. I highly recommend this gizmo!
Any other dopers have one of these?
they showed on TV how they do it. The guy up in the air has a gadget and he hits the button when you go over the first line and again when you go over the second line and it gives him directly your speed. Not anything complicated. I guess the only question of accuracy is the guy’s reflexes in hitting the button
The good news, at least for travelers in California, is that it’s illegal for law enforcement officers to time your vehicle over a measured distance for the purposes of speed enforcement. California Vehicle Code Section 40801 says:
Then the following section defines a speed trap thusly:
In the real world, the bears in the air really do time you as you pass over the markings on the road, but when you put them on the stand, they have to come up with a cock-and-bull story about how they paced you. If they admit timing you over a known distance, you simply ask the judge to dismiss it as a violation of CVC 40801.
Years back, I used to notice big, white lines crossing the highway in some spots, that were separated by a mile or so. They seemed to have no reason and were not on all roads, but more common on intestates. Then a friend told me that the police used an aircraft to check your speed with, that the lines were a mile apart.
You were clocked entering the first line and leaving the second. If you passed that last line in too few seconds, you were speeding and a car up the road would be notified. Like, if you went through the marked section in a minute, you’d be doing 60. If you went through it at 55 seconds, you’d be doing 55 – it all depended on the local speed limits.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I guess my confusion was, and in a small way still is, the volume of people they’d be able to clock. I mean, from what has been explained, and what I surmised to start with, they clock you as you pass the two white lines (actually here in VA there’s three, each 1/4 mile apart for a total of 1/2 mile from the first to the third).
I might be thinking wrong, but to me that says they actually have to visually pick our YOUR CAR when it passes the line as going too fast and time YOUR CAR for that 1/4, 1/2 or 1 mile. It isn’t like radar that gets everything going by – I’d imagine you’d only be able to pick up and time one of maybe 100 cars going by, maybe a little more or fewer. I suppose they might look for cars they think are going fast, and time them as they cross the lines, but again that just seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.
I had read about a law like California’s, and the story I heard was that the helicopter will sometimes track cars by the shadow. That way, they can claim that they didn’t clock YOU, but clocked your shadow instead (which goes the same speed of you). I might have been mistaken, and they meant they paced you and clocked THEIR (the helicopter’s) shadow by the white lines, but you’d think they could just use standard pacing techniques for that.
Ah well. I’m heading down I-81 in VA tomorrow, so I imagine now I’ll just have to add “between those white lines” to “when I see one of those roads in the median ‘for official use only’” as places to slow down a tad bit.
This is a “friend of mine”-type thing, and I can’t remember the friend, but I do recall a friend telling me how he (or a friend… Man, I suck) got a citation in the mail with a picture taken from aircraft of his car speeding along the highway.
Yer pal,
Satan
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Wisconsin and Minnesota were two pioneering states that started using aircraft to check speeds, a good buddy of mine who is a state trooper for Wisconsin said that they can pick speeders out very easy. Answering the question about the economics of the issue, it USED to be very cost effective, the plane of choice was usually a Piper Cub, overhead wing, two passanger (one pilot, one monitor)little stick and rudder and you had one of the best little planes around, very forgiving. As a pilot, I know that these aircraft cost about half as much to operate as a squad car, they were relativly inexpensive to purchase also. About 10-15 years ago, lawsuits started being brought against small aircraft manufactures. This put alot of the small plane companies either out of business or made them increase the price of the aircraft and componants so much that most people, and law enforcement agencies, could no longer afford them (damn tort laws!!!). The rest of us now either try to find old aircraft of questionable condition, or we build our own (go EAA!).
Anyway, Wisconsin uses mainly helicopters now (most common between the Fox Valley on US 41 and the I 94 corridor between Madison and the Minnesota border). And yes Satan, I know that Minnesota uses, or at least did five years ago, photos of your liscense, then they just drop the ticket in the mail.
