Sticking it to “The Man”
I was a Texas certified defensive driving instructor for 10 years. I know for a fact, most people drive like morons and most people speed. I also know that despite denials to the contrary, many cities and towns do have speed traps. It’s a fact of life. Is it fair? No. But then again neither is life.
I remember when I first moved to Texas in 1995. I had tickets to the MLB All-star game in Dallas. I was driving along Interstate 45 when I got pulled over in Fairfield by one of the local cops. He was a big, tall, lanky guy, looked like Enos from The Dukes of Hazard.
Real nice guy though. He pulled me over, asked me where I was going and then we proceeded to talk for about 10 minutes about baseball. He told me pulled me over because I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
Having just moved from New Hampshire, I hadn’t gotten into the habit of wearing my seatbelt. It’s not the required in NH, at least not while I lived there. No one in my family wore one, no one I knew wore one, so right or wrong, I never got into the habit. New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live free or die” and we intend to do just that. Live free or fly through the windshield!
Thankfully, Enos gave me a warning and said I was free to go. As I started my truck up and allowed the officer to pass me on the highway, I noticed another cop car, on the opposite side of the highway, speed by. I thought to myself “Thank god I just got pulled over. Otherwise I might have been doing something wrong.” Because, really, how good of a driver are you after you just got pulled over. You’re perfect. Your hands are at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. You’re checking your mirrors, you’re going 1 mile under the speed limit.
Sure enough, about 1 minute later, another cop car pulled me over. That’s twice in a 5 minute span! This cop wasn’t so nice. He was one of those short, gruff, Buford T. Justice types.
VIdeo is Not Safe For Work due to language. And I really only posted it for my dad. He loves Buford.
He walked up to my truck and said “Boy…” It’s never good when they say “boy”. If they call you “son” you’re okay, if they call you “boy” you’re getting busted. He said “Boy, where do you think you’re going?” I was hoping everyone in Fairfield was a baseball fan. I told him where I was going…he looked nonplussed. He asked for my license, his eyes narrowed as he saw I was a register driver from the Granite State. Then he walked back to his cruiser.
While I waited, I wondered what in the world did I do? There’s no way I was speeding…I was just pulled over! Also, my truck goes from 0 to 60 in like, a half hour. I couldn’t hit 65MPH if I was going downhill with a stiff breeze behind me.
So he comes back to my window and gruffly says “Where did you get that sticker, boy?” On my back window I had a New Hampshire State Troopers Association sticker. I worked with the State Police in New Hampshire and that was my “get out of jail free card”. If I got pulled over by a trooper, they’d see the sticker, I’d “accidently” give them my state ID instead of my license. They would instantly see I worked with them and they’d let me go.
I smiled and said “Oh, I worked for the state police.”
So I thought this Broderick Crawford wanna-be might just let me go. Show some professional courtesy.
He said “Guess you should have known better” and handed me a ticker for going 67 in a 65.
Apparently he wasn’t going to let some Damn Yankee get off without a ticket in his town. So I know cops can be unfair. But as I always talk about thinking ahead, planning and considering problems before they happen I’m taking a small amount of guilty pleasure knowing that someone applied some negative thinking to speed traps and came up with this ingenious plan (from ABC NEWS):
Flashing oncoming motorists with your high beams used to be an effective, if low-tech, way to warn them about speed traps up the road. But radar-gun wielding cops have increasingly given way to photo-enforcement cameras that nab drivers with a click of a shutter, and those can be hard to spot. The trend toward cameras has not only increased the number of busted speeders and red-light runners, it’s been a bonanza for municipal coffers.
But now the wonders of Web 2.0 and portable navigation systems can use motorists’ tips and Microsoft Virtual Earth to help keep you from appearing on your local police department’s version of candid camera. It’s a lot more effective than relying on a bleating radar detector.
Shannon Atkinson launched Njection.com as a place for gearheads to shoot the breeze about anything and everything auto-related. It wasn’t long before he sensed a theme in the posts. “One of the biggest topics on the site became speed traps and cameras,” Atkinson told us. “People want to know about those whether they’re a truck driver, a road warrior or just someone who wants to drive without worrying about it.”
So Atkinson added Speedtrap, a feature that combines drivers’ tips with Microsoft Virtual Earth to identify speed traps - either a real, live cop with a radar gun or one of those damned cameras - throughout the U.S. There’s even a few foreign cities, such as London, Toronto and Rome.
Now, the information can be downloaded directly to portable navigation devices from Garmin, Mio, TomTom and others via Njection.com so that drivers can pinpoint speed traps on a given route. Atkinson says the identity of Njection’s many speed-trap tipsters is kept confidential, and they include more than a few police officers who like the site because what “they’re mostly interested in is getting people to drive safely.”
Feel free to discuss the pros and cons by posting a comment!
