Originally published at: Police searching for man who hid nails roadside at speed trap to flatten cop car tires | Boing Boing
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The resistance is strong in this ever elusive Ohio man who wields the board of nails for the purpose of thwarting the ACAB’s then disappears into the Tinkers Trail, up the road a piece. Be strong Ohio Man!
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" They constructed a board with a nail in it, but they won’t stop there. They’ll construct bigger boards, with bigger nails, and they’ll construct a board with a nail in it so large, it will destroy them all… "
-Ohio police
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At least he gave them something to do to keep the community safe instead of sitting in their cars waiting for a chance to increase their budget at the expense of unwary drivers.
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this
please ticket the crazy drivers I encounter day to day
please cease the revenue generation traps and cameras that do nothing to increase our safety
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Ohio is serious about speed trap income. If you have to drive through it, stick to the speed limit and don’t feed the pigs.
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I’ve fantasized about doing this. Sad to hear no target tires were affected.
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I am in the awkward position of thinking that we mostly shouldn’t have police, but also thinking that traffic laws are super important*. Seriously, what’s the case against robotic traffic law enforcement other than “It’s my right to speed and mostly not get caught”?
- This unique perspective is a result of my long history of spending part of each day outside of my protective metal cage
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Robots don’t enforce laws. All they do is send context-free tickets for stuff that may or may not have been done days or weeks earlier.
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and sometimes the private companies contracted to issue the tickets will do helpful things like shorten the yellow lights and kick back money to local political campaigns or police unions with the extra cash.
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Obviously don’t do that but this scene popped into my head: 
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Ironically, one of the international providers of Red Light/Speed camera systems is called Gatso.
I used to work for Redflex, many, many years ago when it was still trying to break into the American market (it was founded in Melbourne, Australia). I was R&D, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still PCBs in those systems that I worked on. (There are certainly some mechanical fittings still being used that I designed.)
I just wanted to point out:
- yes, I helped design Red Light/Speed cameras. I’m sorry.
- But not very sorry, because at our end the goal really was to end up with safer traffic. The design of the sensors was meant to minimise false-positives and false negatives (and you’d be amazed how tricky that is in some cases), and to catch edge and corner cases (such as the “screeching stopper”, where the brakes are on so hard that the speed detected at the first axle is significantly different from that at the second axle).
At the technical end of things, there were engineering challenges in all sorts of fields, the sudden discovery that trigonometry is important after all, and an honest desire to stop people speeding and/or running red lights and being a danger to themselves and others.
The trouble comes at management. We saw several contracts go to the opposition, whose technology was known to be worse, with suspicions of shenanigans at high levels (including in city governments). In the end, that company went under, because their management was making promises their tech couldn’t cash, and the remnants were merged into Redflex. (After some lean times for Redflex, which included the round of layoffs which saw me go, twenty years ago now.) And the corruption seems to be more or less endemic. And this includes, but is not limited to:
- changing the yellow cycle so that drivers don’t have enough time to slow and stop safely for a red light
- demanding sites be set up where they will raise money, rather than improve safety
- changing speed limits arbitrarily to catch as many drivers as possible for travelling at a safe but illegal speed, sometimes by having confusing and (deliberately? You might say that I couldn’t possibly comment) badly signposted changes of speed zone, or by changing the speed limit and not advertising it well or at all.
- flooding one area with sites, while leaving regions unmonitored… you’d be amazed how often a low socio-economic region would have cameras on every other corner, where the neighboring high socio-economic region wouldn’t have any. Or maybe you wouldn’t.
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My hero!
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Oh fack, Ohio is the refuge of scoundrels. I had suspected all along.
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Heroic genius. May there be many lesser copycats. #MCAB
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Best way to deal with speed traps is to pass a law that revenue from tickets goes to ANYBODY BUT THE POLICE.
Library fund is a good choice.
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In Canada, violations of the Provincial Traffic Act sends the money to the provincial coffers, not the municipalities. The municipalities are given a portion of those monies but none of the moving violation revenues go directly back to specific cities.
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