FYI, I run a Larsen NMO 49 inch whip which helps alot for CHP.
Larsen NMO40 [NMO40] - $36.95 : The Antenna Farm :: , Your Two Way Radio Source!
Larsen NMO40 [NMO40] - $36.95 : The Antenna Farm :: , Your Two Way Radio Source!
CHP Air Speed Enforcement
- Thread starter stingray327
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Thanks again for the video. Fun watch. I didn't really see how they were getting the speeds. Do you know if they caught the other silver car?
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40-50mhz would be the sweet spot. I ordered a Larson Tri-band for my mobile use. Should get everything low to the 800's which is my primary listening area.
I actually have 2 antennas. The big whip for CHP, and a Larsen 150/450/800 which works great for conventional or 800 mhz trunked systems in NV and UT.
Larsen NMO150/450/800 [NMO150/450/800] - $29.95 : The Antenna Farm :: , Your Two Way Radio Source!
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They have some serious high tech camera on the plane that (as you can see in the video) when you place the crosshairs on target, it shows exact LAT/LONG and ALT of target. With that, its simple math using onboard GPS to do a delta of the plane and target.
I sometimes hear the guy in the plane telling the trooper below, "He's at 83.... now 87", within seconds. This is not the old-fashioned stopwatch and painted markings on the ground of the 1970's.
Here's a photo of the actual aircraft based in Auburn...
http://www.radardetectorforum.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=11900&d=1358404409
CHP has also been contracting with Soloy Aviation Solutions for a wing-mounted FLIR kit on two of the C206s. They mention two common FLIR manufacturers are "FLIR" and "L3 (WESCAM)."
http://www.soloy.com/files/LatestNews/Press Releases/SOLOY_CHP_PR_July 12 2011 DAS_MM_1.pdf
My guess on the ranging technique (lat/long, distance, relative velocity) was going to be LIDAR... and sure enough the L3 (WESCAM) can do both laser rangefinding and laser illumination (enhances FLIR images in total darkness, presumably with an IR beam invisible to the naked eye):
L-3 Communications WESCAM
I knew the Sacramento air units were getting FLIRs, but I didn't realize they included laser range finding. That's definitely an improvement over the old two points and a stopwatch or pacing techniques (although with the high accuracy of modern GPS you can probably pace vehicles much easier these days).
I have the most effective anti radar, anti GPS, anti aircraft and anti laser device ever invented. I place my foot on the gas only enough to travel at the speed limit. I never have a problem when I drive past a black and white or one that appears behind me unexpectedly. I arrive at my destination less stressed, less fatigued and probably almost as soon as speeders do.
I told a nephew many years ago about this and he argued that I was absolutely wrong. He later changed his mind. He drove a bus for the Davis, CA transit system and was a student at UC Davis. He often drove college groups for various events and would drive as fast as the bus would go, up to about 80 mph. He worked one event where the group was large enough to need two buses and one was equipped with a governor that did not allow the bus to exceed 65 mph. The bus he drove was not equipped with one. The two buses left Davis at the same time with the destination of Ashland, Oregon and made no stops. My nephew arrived and did not expect to see the second bus for more than an hour. 14 minutes later the second bus arrived. He never sped again and to this day does not in his own car.
I have to ask, why is 14 minutes so important when driving half the north-south distance of California and over Grants Pass into Oregon? If you are driving from the Bay Area to Reno on 80 how much time can you gain by speeding and using a radar detector? Even if it seems significant to you, is it really worth the reduction in gas mileage, chance of tickets, increased hazard and increased wear and tear on the vehicle? I've driven long distances to large fires where I was asked to "expedite." I always arrived more tired in those cases.
"Speed traps" are kind of like "activist judges," the latter being any judge who makes a decision you don't like. Speed traps that target problem areas for safety reasons are called speed traps by those who just want to go as fast as they wish. Many people who travel 395 between L.A. and Reno call speed enforcement in small towns along the route "speed traps." If you live in one of the small towns as I did in Bridgeport for seven years you understand why speed enforcement, and more of it, needs to be done. Back in the 90's I was taking the small children of my then girlfriend (widowed) from her house in Lee Vining to a place across 395 to get ice cream. I was shocked and scared when I was taking one seven year old and one five year old in a marked crosswalk across the highway. Two cars blew through the town and past us while we were in the crosswalk at 55 mph or more in a 30 mph zone. While we were in the number one lane one of them passed us going southbound in the northbound lanes. I fully support speed traps and would like to see the number of them increased by 5-10 times.
I'm not being high and mighty here, I'm just pointing out how illogical speeding is, in my opinion that is.
I told a nephew many years ago about this and he argued that I was absolutely wrong. He later changed his mind. He drove a bus for the Davis, CA transit system and was a student at UC Davis. He often drove college groups for various events and would drive as fast as the bus would go, up to about 80 mph. He worked one event where the group was large enough to need two buses and one was equipped with a governor that did not allow the bus to exceed 65 mph. The bus he drove was not equipped with one. The two buses left Davis at the same time with the destination of Ashland, Oregon and made no stops. My nephew arrived and did not expect to see the second bus for more than an hour. 14 minutes later the second bus arrived. He never sped again and to this day does not in his own car.
I have to ask, why is 14 minutes so important when driving half the north-south distance of California and over Grants Pass into Oregon? If you are driving from the Bay Area to Reno on 80 how much time can you gain by speeding and using a radar detector? Even if it seems significant to you, is it really worth the reduction in gas mileage, chance of tickets, increased hazard and increased wear and tear on the vehicle? I've driven long distances to large fires where I was asked to "expedite." I always arrived more tired in those cases.
"Speed traps" are kind of like "activist judges," the latter being any judge who makes a decision you don't like. Speed traps that target problem areas for safety reasons are called speed traps by those who just want to go as fast as they wish. Many people who travel 395 between L.A. and Reno call speed enforcement in small towns along the route "speed traps." If you live in one of the small towns as I did in Bridgeport for seven years you understand why speed enforcement, and more of it, needs to be done. Back in the 90's I was taking the small children of my then girlfriend (widowed) from her house in Lee Vining to a place across 395 to get ice cream. I was shocked and scared when I was taking one seven year old and one five year old in a marked crosswalk across the highway. Two cars blew through the town and past us while we were in the crosswalk at 55 mph or more in a 30 mph zone. While we were in the number one lane one of them passed us going southbound in the northbound lanes. I fully support speed traps and would like to see the number of them increased by 5-10 times.
I'm not being high and mighty here, I'm just pointing out how illogical speeding is, in my opinion that is.
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I agree with the traffic safety/speed commentary.
However,'speedtrap' has a specific defintion under California law and they are infact illegal.
Speedtrap does not meen enhanced enforcement in a given area, they are far more insidious.
A product of the 1920's, see VC§40802.
Repsectfully,
Mike
However,'speedtrap' has a specific defintion under California law and they are infact illegal.
Speedtrap does not meen enhanced enforcement in a given area, they are far more insidious.
A product of the 1920's, see VC§40802.
Repsectfully,
Mike
Chiming in again on time/distance calculations. It's a bit over 500 miles from Salt Lake City to Reno Nevada. For the most part it's open desert. The current speed limit out there is an artificially low 75 mph. I slice off 1hour 45 minutes on that run by going a safe (but illegal) speed. Once I am in metro areas or in California is go-with-the-flow. My usual start to finish is 10 hours vs close to 12 hours going the speed limit. Those extra 2 hours behind the wheel are taxing, and during windy or stormy conditions where I need to drive closer to the speed limit, I end up staying overnight at a motel 6 along the way. Extra expense and a LOT longer to get back.
I agree that driving in California at a reasonable speed vs someone trying to push it (good luck with that in typical traffic) you gain little. But for open desert where the space between each vehicle is a mile, poking along at 75 is a loooooong time.
I agree that driving in California at a reasonable speed vs someone trying to push it (good luck with that in typical traffic) you gain little. But for open desert where the space between each vehicle is a mile, poking along at 75 is a loooooong time.
- Joined
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On longer trips where I don't have things programmed I usually pull up the 5-0 app and listen to my home PD. Keeps my plenty busy and entertained. With the amount of calls and radio traffic time goes by pretty quickly.
NWtoSFO
Member
I remember responding to someone here over hearing upcoming Highway Patrol units while travelling cross-country. Told him that if he drove close to the speed limit he wouldn't have to worry about it. Got blasted for it. Idiot. I'll agree with you; speeding through most of California is illogical. However, when I'm out in Nevada or some other western states, I find it most annoying, and illogical, that the speed limit is anything less than 90. As Tahoekid said, it's a loooooong drive across the desert. If I've seen one mountain, I'll still see it in 25 minutes! And there ain't no flowers to stop and smell while heading east.
But, if you get caught speeding in some little one-horse town, that's your fault. Use your head. That's why the police sit and wait for some idiot that wants to get 3 blocks down the road 10 seconds faster.
I used to have a pretty heavy foot. Now I drive speed limit (regardless of what it is) and no faster. What changed my perspective? Being a firefighter / EMT for a rural FD with a VERY large district.
In the years I was with the department, I saw only ONE single-vehicle fatality that occurred below 55 mph, assuming that the occupants were belted. EVERY single vehicle, belted occupant fatality but that one happened at speeds of above 70, and the majority at speeds over 80. Speed limit is not mentioned because it didn't matter. The lower speed fatality involved driving off a cliff, which is known to spoil your day. You get used to seeing stuff like that after a while unless it involves kids. But you learn... (1) Not going over the posted limit usually does improve your likelihood of making it to your destination intact; (2) Having a single-vehicle accident at very high speeds regardless of what the posted limit is REALLY HURTS. I have been REALLY HURT due to activities of a military nature, and I do not wish to be REALLY HURT again.
In the years I was with the department, I saw only ONE single-vehicle fatality that occurred below 55 mph, assuming that the occupants were belted. EVERY single vehicle, belted occupant fatality but that one happened at speeds of above 70, and the majority at speeds over 80. Speed limit is not mentioned because it didn't matter. The lower speed fatality involved driving off a cliff, which is known to spoil your day. You get used to seeing stuff like that after a while unless it involves kids. But you learn... (1) Not going over the posted limit usually does improve your likelihood of making it to your destination intact; (2) Having a single-vehicle accident at very high speeds regardless of what the posted limit is REALLY HURTS. I have been REALLY HURT due to activities of a military nature, and I do not wish to be REALLY HURT again.
Be careful about calling a place a "one horse town." Other titles for small towns given by metro residents, the media and Hollywood are "sleepy little village," "hick town," "more (insert one of cows, horses, dogs) than people town," "inbred town," "nothing but a wide spot in the road," "quaint little place" and no doubt some others I've heard and don't recall. They come off as being condescending, as if the people who live in such places have nothing to do but sleep, are idiots, don't have enough to do, etc. I've lived in a couple of these and the term small town, in my definition and experience is fewer than 1000 residents, everything else is a town, city, metro area or megalopolis.
My experience is that people in small towns have more to do than those in cities as they have to fend for themselves for many things. They may cut their own firewood, fix their own cars, work hard jobs that quite often find them outside in weather not of their choosing, clear snow from long driveways if they live in snow country, build (and/or remodel and/or maintain as well), keep horses, have more outdoor recreation opportunities, may hunt and fish to provide some of their own food, grow gardens and probably some others I've forgotten to mention. You are not looked at by how much money you have or what trendy things you own, but what skills and tools you have to offer in the mix of needs for the community, i.e. do you have plumbing skills that can help in constructing the addition to a church or community center, can you operate a backhoe, can you weld, do you own welding equipment, what kind of lesser used tools do you have (metal lathes,ball joint forks, those used only when rebuilding an engine), if you break down in remote places can you repair the vehicle or get back into town, can you sew, can you cook for a hundred people or more at a time, can you butcher animals, can you snowshoe, can you cross country ski, can you backpack/hike off trail sometimes in the middle of the night, can you rock climb (often needed for volunteer search and rescue teams), can you repair radio/TV products, are you a ham radio operator, can you help my kid with his physics homework, do you have any veterinary skills (I had a neighbor who neutered dogs and cats on the workbench in his garage and no one's animal ever had a problem as a result as he sanitized his instruments and work area) . When I moved to one small town with my now 36 year old Toyota Land Cruiser I could see the wheels spinning in a few people's heads as the short wheel base and gearing of these can help when other rigs cannot. There is a lot of bartering of services (I'll mix and pour the concrete for your new garage slab if you weld a trailer hitch on my pickup) and community service organization work done in smaller places where professional service providers don't exist. Now there are folks in metro areas that can do these things or have done them in the past or do them as a business, but in smaller, more remote places these skills are called upon far more often. In other words people and communities are more self reliant and I've found myself far busier in small, remote towns than I did growing up in a megalopolis or living in a town of 8,500 people as I do now (I know I sold out by moving to a big town in my older age just like my uncles with farms). For all you hear about the disadvantages of everyone knowing everyone else's business, the flip side is that everyone knows and is concerned about each other.
Living in "quaint, out of the way, little sleepy village " allows less sleep than living in a city. Try cutting (in a remote area with very rough "roads"), splitting and stacking 5-7 cords of firewood each year when each cord represents working from quitting time at work on Friday to stacking the last of the wood by flash or flood light on Sunday night with about 8 hours down time on Friday and Saturday night. After doing so you just leave the saw dirty and will sharpen it the following Friday afternoon because you are so tired and dirty. December and January might require more than burning one cord some winters.
There is a sometimes deserved and sometimes not deserved bias in small towns that everyone from a city is an idiot as many of those have worked real hard proving that over the years. I'm not so smug as I view at it as people are just out of their element.
When people mention traffic enforcement in small towns they often call any speed enforcement a speed trap or something done to raise revenue and the CVC definition of a speed trap is not a criteria in giving that opinion. When someone says look out for the cops in that little "one horse/sleepy/stupid/inbred/in the middle of nowhere" town (you pick the adjective) they are often implying that the law enforcement officers in places like these have nothing better to do than give you a ticket for violating a speed limit in their town. In the small towns I've lived in speed enforcement, as I mentioned in my discussion of Bridgeport and Lee Vining, is because some metro snobs trying to get from San Diego to Reno in less than 7 hours or from Albuquerque to Phoenix in 9 hours (via I-25 to Socorro and U.S. 60 to the Valley of the Sun megalopolis) have nearly killed my girlfriend's kids or the guy who is going to weld that trailer hitch for me. In Mono and Inyo Counties you have people endangering everyone driving 395 or going through Olancha, Lone Pine, etc. so they can watch 20 more minutes of MTV or get a closer parking space at Vons (Safeway with a fancy name) at the peak of people getting in to town needing groceries or want to get there this afternoon before the lifts close - "why, don't you Doooood?" There are kids with no parents, parents with no kids, widows/widowers (that Lee Vining girlfriend I had was widowed and her two kids didn't have a father because of a traffic accident) in Mono County because of this attitude.
Now NWtoSFO I'm sure your term "one horse town" was not in any way meant in a derogatory way, but hearing other people use the term and think that our cops and us have nothing better to do than prey on people traveling through has gotten very old. Rural area cops, on average, see higher numbers of more severe traffic accidents than their counterparts in metro areas.
I also grew tired of going on scene of a traffic accident and seeing people eviscerated, lacerated, flail chested, blunt force "trauma-ed," bled out, "pneumothoraxed" and all the other things that caused me barf out guts every now and again due, in large part, because of excessive speed, either the basic speed law or the posted limit. For those of you who think it is logical and less annoying to drive fast on the "open road" think about the guy who hits a deer at 85 mph sufficient to throw it several hundred feet back into the windshield of the family doing the speed limit in the right lane and killing the people in front and severely injuring the kids in the back, who would have avoided hitting a deer or throw it so far enough to kill someone because they were going the speed limit. How about the 85 mph driver that experiences a sudden tire decompression (I don't mean blowout) and can't control the vehicle, crosses the center median and hits the family down the street from you and leaves only the infant in the child seat in back alive? How about the guy who hits an unexpected sand layer, black ice in shade or full cardboard boxes assumed to be empty when these things don't exist anywhere in this 90 mile stretch of wide open road but in one spot, looses control of his vehicle and rolls it into the one driven the speed limit in the right lane of the interstate and kills the grandparents of one of the kids in your Boy Scout troop all because he couldn't slow fast enough once he saw the hazard? On this latter accident the sand, the ice or box are probably listed as the primary cause, not the real cause of simply driving too fast.
There was no wind during the middle of the day with light to moderate traffic both ways, on U.S. 93 between Hoover Dam and Kingman, AZ on one of many occasions I've driven the section. It was monsoon season and a thunderhead south of me created a mini (6-8" deep) dune in the road between me and the car in front of me. The wind stopped before I encountered the dune, but I wasn't driving over the speed limit at the time, so I managed to slow quickly enough to avoid a worse situation than I found myself in. I've encountered extreme cross roadway winds, by extreme I mean course altering caused by topography, while driving on windy days, and managed to keep the vehicle in my lane or just on the pavement because excessive speed was not a factor. I've encountered many deer trying to hit me and driving the speed limit was a factor in not letting them do this.
Is saving two hours to get to Boise, Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Spokane, Missoula, et al, really worth the risk? Is it worth the increased level of fatigue driving faster causes? The faster a vehicle is driven the more stress is experienced, whether the driver knows it or not, which results in being less alert and productive once the destination is reached. I learned this driving up I-5 at 0200 to get from Bridgeport to Happy Camp or some such in the Intermountain region on (insert I-40 70, 80, 15 or some other long, straight highway of your choice) for a fire assignment. I would like to research this probable cause/effect rather than rely on my own observations, but I've spent a lot of time asking, begging, and writing a few speeding tickets (actually reckless driving on a National Forest road because I didn't have radar) during my career for people to SLOW DOWN.
Now I've put this discussion in the Tavern, but I don't go there because so many people aren't civil.
My experience is that people in small towns have more to do than those in cities as they have to fend for themselves for many things. They may cut their own firewood, fix their own cars, work hard jobs that quite often find them outside in weather not of their choosing, clear snow from long driveways if they live in snow country, build (and/or remodel and/or maintain as well), keep horses, have more outdoor recreation opportunities, may hunt and fish to provide some of their own food, grow gardens and probably some others I've forgotten to mention. You are not looked at by how much money you have or what trendy things you own, but what skills and tools you have to offer in the mix of needs for the community, i.e. do you have plumbing skills that can help in constructing the addition to a church or community center, can you operate a backhoe, can you weld, do you own welding equipment, what kind of lesser used tools do you have (metal lathes,ball joint forks, those used only when rebuilding an engine), if you break down in remote places can you repair the vehicle or get back into town, can you sew, can you cook for a hundred people or more at a time, can you butcher animals, can you snowshoe, can you cross country ski, can you backpack/hike off trail sometimes in the middle of the night, can you rock climb (often needed for volunteer search and rescue teams), can you repair radio/TV products, are you a ham radio operator, can you help my kid with his physics homework, do you have any veterinary skills (I had a neighbor who neutered dogs and cats on the workbench in his garage and no one's animal ever had a problem as a result as he sanitized his instruments and work area) . When I moved to one small town with my now 36 year old Toyota Land Cruiser I could see the wheels spinning in a few people's heads as the short wheel base and gearing of these can help when other rigs cannot. There is a lot of bartering of services (I'll mix and pour the concrete for your new garage slab if you weld a trailer hitch on my pickup) and community service organization work done in smaller places where professional service providers don't exist. Now there are folks in metro areas that can do these things or have done them in the past or do them as a business, but in smaller, more remote places these skills are called upon far more often. In other words people and communities are more self reliant and I've found myself far busier in small, remote towns than I did growing up in a megalopolis or living in a town of 8,500 people as I do now (I know I sold out by moving to a big town in my older age just like my uncles with farms). For all you hear about the disadvantages of everyone knowing everyone else's business, the flip side is that everyone knows and is concerned about each other.
Living in "quaint, out of the way, little sleepy village " allows less sleep than living in a city. Try cutting (in a remote area with very rough "roads"), splitting and stacking 5-7 cords of firewood each year when each cord represents working from quitting time at work on Friday to stacking the last of the wood by flash or flood light on Sunday night with about 8 hours down time on Friday and Saturday night. After doing so you just leave the saw dirty and will sharpen it the following Friday afternoon because you are so tired and dirty. December and January might require more than burning one cord some winters.
There is a sometimes deserved and sometimes not deserved bias in small towns that everyone from a city is an idiot as many of those have worked real hard proving that over the years. I'm not so smug as I view at it as people are just out of their element.
When people mention traffic enforcement in small towns they often call any speed enforcement a speed trap or something done to raise revenue and the CVC definition of a speed trap is not a criteria in giving that opinion. When someone says look out for the cops in that little "one horse/sleepy/stupid/inbred/in the middle of nowhere" town (you pick the adjective) they are often implying that the law enforcement officers in places like these have nothing better to do than give you a ticket for violating a speed limit in their town. In the small towns I've lived in speed enforcement, as I mentioned in my discussion of Bridgeport and Lee Vining, is because some metro snobs trying to get from San Diego to Reno in less than 7 hours or from Albuquerque to Phoenix in 9 hours (via I-25 to Socorro and U.S. 60 to the Valley of the Sun megalopolis) have nearly killed my girlfriend's kids or the guy who is going to weld that trailer hitch for me. In Mono and Inyo Counties you have people endangering everyone driving 395 or going through Olancha, Lone Pine, etc. so they can watch 20 more minutes of MTV or get a closer parking space at Vons (Safeway with a fancy name) at the peak of people getting in to town needing groceries or want to get there this afternoon before the lifts close - "why, don't you Doooood?" There are kids with no parents, parents with no kids, widows/widowers (that Lee Vining girlfriend I had was widowed and her two kids didn't have a father because of a traffic accident) in Mono County because of this attitude.
Now NWtoSFO I'm sure your term "one horse town" was not in any way meant in a derogatory way, but hearing other people use the term and think that our cops and us have nothing better to do than prey on people traveling through has gotten very old. Rural area cops, on average, see higher numbers of more severe traffic accidents than their counterparts in metro areas.
I also grew tired of going on scene of a traffic accident and seeing people eviscerated, lacerated, flail chested, blunt force "trauma-ed," bled out, "pneumothoraxed" and all the other things that caused me barf out guts every now and again due, in large part, because of excessive speed, either the basic speed law or the posted limit. For those of you who think it is logical and less annoying to drive fast on the "open road" think about the guy who hits a deer at 85 mph sufficient to throw it several hundred feet back into the windshield of the family doing the speed limit in the right lane and killing the people in front and severely injuring the kids in the back, who would have avoided hitting a deer or throw it so far enough to kill someone because they were going the speed limit. How about the 85 mph driver that experiences a sudden tire decompression (I don't mean blowout) and can't control the vehicle, crosses the center median and hits the family down the street from you and leaves only the infant in the child seat in back alive? How about the guy who hits an unexpected sand layer, black ice in shade or full cardboard boxes assumed to be empty when these things don't exist anywhere in this 90 mile stretch of wide open road but in one spot, looses control of his vehicle and rolls it into the one driven the speed limit in the right lane of the interstate and kills the grandparents of one of the kids in your Boy Scout troop all because he couldn't slow fast enough once he saw the hazard? On this latter accident the sand, the ice or box are probably listed as the primary cause, not the real cause of simply driving too fast.
There was no wind during the middle of the day with light to moderate traffic both ways, on U.S. 93 between Hoover Dam and Kingman, AZ on one of many occasions I've driven the section. It was monsoon season and a thunderhead south of me created a mini (6-8" deep) dune in the road between me and the car in front of me. The wind stopped before I encountered the dune, but I wasn't driving over the speed limit at the time, so I managed to slow quickly enough to avoid a worse situation than I found myself in. I've encountered extreme cross roadway winds, by extreme I mean course altering caused by topography, while driving on windy days, and managed to keep the vehicle in my lane or just on the pavement because excessive speed was not a factor. I've encountered many deer trying to hit me and driving the speed limit was a factor in not letting them do this.
Is saving two hours to get to Boise, Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Spokane, Missoula, et al, really worth the risk? Is it worth the increased level of fatigue driving faster causes? The faster a vehicle is driven the more stress is experienced, whether the driver knows it or not, which results in being less alert and productive once the destination is reached. I learned this driving up I-5 at 0200 to get from Bridgeport to Happy Camp or some such in the Intermountain region on (insert I-40 70, 80, 15 or some other long, straight highway of your choice) for a fire assignment. I would like to research this probable cause/effect rather than rely on my own observations, but I've spent a lot of time asking, begging, and writing a few speeding tickets (actually reckless driving on a National Forest road because I didn't have radar) during my career for people to SLOW DOWN.
Now I've put this discussion in the Tavern, but I don't go there because so many people aren't civil.
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Sorry about the "pontification" of my last post, I don't know what got into me. I would like to delete it, but can't now. If anyone else has information regarding CHP air enforcement please post it. I don't want my long post to kill the thread.
stingray327
Member
I use a Antenna Specialists Mon-51 excellent antenna. It ashame that you can no longer get this antenna as Antenna Specialists is gone.
stingray327
Member
VASCAR? Those planes still do pace cars.
stingray327
Member
That silver car looked like a V-6 Dodge Challenger.
mkewman
Member
I'm not one to speed (anymore. got a couple of tickets when I got my own car and learned my lesson) but the I-80 hill between Auburn and Loomis, where CHP seems to target most often, it's EXTREMELY easy to go 80 and not even realize it, if you're not paying attention (the flow on average is 80+). If you coast in a midsize sedan, you're going to go 75+ by the time you're done with the first hill.
Not saying they shouldn't do speed enforcement there, but doing speed enforcement in that spot is just like shooting fish in a barrel. I wish they'd do more speed enforcement on 50 and 99. I see SO many people "hot roddin' it" on those corridors.
Back to the topic:
Remember that CHP does not do speed enforcement via Helo. It's ALL fixed wing in the valley division (if not state wide)
Also, CHP doesn't make money on the tickets, the local counties do. Therefore every time they do speed enforcement, they're losing money. They can't recoup the costs of doing the enforcement by giving out tickets. That's why (as Antfreq said) they get state and federal grants. (Click it or Ticket for example is a federal program)
Not saying they shouldn't do speed enforcement there, but doing speed enforcement in that spot is just like shooting fish in a barrel. I wish they'd do more speed enforcement on 50 and 99. I see SO many people "hot roddin' it" on those corridors.
Back to the topic:
Remember that CHP does not do speed enforcement via Helo. It's ALL fixed wing in the valley division (if not state wide)
Also, CHP doesn't make money on the tickets, the local counties do. Therefore every time they do speed enforcement, they're losing money. They can't recoup the costs of doing the enforcement by giving out tickets. That's why (as Antfreq said) they get state and federal grants. (Click it or Ticket for example is a federal program)
Way back in my brain, so subject to the frailties of memory, I remember hearing that some fine money went to the county, but some portion of it went into a state fund. This was back before the state's budget was modified as it has been since the crash of 2008. Money that the state had distributed to counties, especially in education, was withheld to balance the budget. It is possible that as a small gesture, the state started giving all the money to the counties.
If I remember correctly fine money collected from enforcement of the Fish and Game and Public Resource Codes all went to the counties. We (Forest Service officers) we able to write citations for violations of this code and we used the same bail schedule the state agencies did, but the money all went into the general fund of the U.S. treasury and might be used for purposes other than natural resources. We usually called in the state agencies to write citations for violations of these codes so the county could use the money for local natural resource purposes. If a state wildlife officer was not available we would collect the needed information on an incident report and forward it to DFW. We also had authority to write citations for the OHV portions of the Vehicle Code, but did not call in state officers as the use of the fine money was not as important as it was to DFW.
However, the thought comes to mind that the state's view on this was to remove the incentive for the CHP to write tickets to bring in more money for the agency so the money is given to a non-state entity.
It has been many, perhaps more than 30 years, since I've heard any speed enforcement being done using aircraft being done in Mono County. From time to time, a unit will set up its radar and a few more units will be used to catch speeders, but this doesn't happen enough. I would like to see the CHP use it in the Owens Valley on big holiday ski weekends when unsafe driving occurs. The accident rate justifies it. The summer crowd is more polite and laid back, making enforcement then a little less of a priority. As I used to say during my USFS career, the winter crowd has higher percentage of "aggressively apathetic" people.
NWtoSFO
Member
Nope, it wasn't meant in a derogatory way at all. I've lived in small towns (Pleasant Valley, Mt Aukum, Miranda) and love it being away from cityfolk. If anything, I hate the general attitude of people from the city. Guess I picked up "one horse town" from my grandpa who thought that of any town outside the Bay Area. And you're right about wintertime drivers. I travel alot on the weekends and one of my favorite routes is Hwy 88 from Jackson to the border. Summertime travelers are much more relaxed behind the wheel. Friendly, too. But the skiers! I'd love to run them off the road when they pass me in packs. Like the snow at Kirkwood won't be there in the afternoon!
I think one of the reason LE in places like Sacramento don't do more speed enforcement is that there are soooo many pending calls that take them away from being visible like officers are in less populated areas. Here in Citrus Heights, it was noted that Sac Sheriff handed out an average of 5 speeding tix an month(!) on roads now handled by CHPD. CHPD averaged over 200/mo their first year, thanks to having so many motor units available for speed enforcement.
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