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Detecting Tailgaters With Lasers
stoolpigeon writes "Police in Arizona are using laser range finders to detect and ticket tailgaters. An officer can now measure not only the speed of passing vehicles but also how close they are to one another. The detectors described in the article are built by Laser Technology Inc., a company that provides lasers for traffic control, engineering, and even tactical/military solutions. The article mentions how tailgating is connected to many accidents and incidents of road rage; this observation fits my experience."
Bad traffic in Phoenix has significantly less to do with illegial imigrants who can't read English (sheesh...) and much more to do with the facts that:
(a) Phoenix is too broad for it's own good. People live 30-40-50 miles from where they work.
(b) Phoenix freeway and surface street infrastructre has lagged behind our phenominal growth (see above).
(c) Phoenix is a melting pot. Nobody's actually FROM Phoenix. We're made of EX-somethings. Sure, there's a few natives, but it's NOT the norm.
(d) We have a significant snowbird population (also, see above).
Combine the overloaded bad infrastructure with a nation's worth of driving customs and a constantly supply of new (and seasonal) people, and you're looking at the bulk of what's wrong with Phoenix traffic.
Speeds of 85+ are the norm on I-10 (and 17 and 101/202/60/51) when congestion permits it.
Tailgating at night is particularly bothersome. I drove a subcompact car, and an SUV or truck on my tail with its headlights in my eyes is blinding. That's a really dangerous situation on the country roads, where I need to have enough vision to be able to watch for deer, fallen branches, etc.
My usual approach is to just slow down to the point where I'm not overdriving my vision, but since this tends to anger the clueless fuckers behind me, they will often respond by getting even closer or turning on their brights, which just forces me to slow down even more. I don't know why they don't pass; apparently it takes an appreciable amount of intelligence to figure out that the guy who is currently driving at 30 but was going 55 when you first got on his tail is probably not going to speed up and it's easier to just get ahead of him if you really absolutely have to be driving 65 at night during deer season.
sample question from the driving theory test in the UK (paraphrased):
"You are travelling at the spped limit. A car comes up behind you and flashes their lights at you requesting to overtake. Do you:
a) Speed up
b) Slow down
c) Maintain your speed
d) Sound your horn"
The correct answer is c. Frankly, when you go about trying to blind the person infront of you by flashing full beams into their rear-view mirror (particularly at night) for doing nothing more than following Driving Standards Agency advice, you deserve everything you get. Up to and including a stinger missile.
FGD 135
I always thought it was a flat '2 second' distance. However, most people can't translate seconds (a time unit) into a feet (a distance unit) using the most basic of physics so they come up with the 1ft per 10mph of speed. This flat time rule is the same as your fluctuating distance rule: the slower you are going, the closer you are (in that two seconds you cover less distance) and the faster you are going the further back you are.
;)
I like to look at a car's rear bumper, see it cross one of the dotted lines or reflectors in the road as a reference point and count in my head 'one one-thousand', 'two one-thousand' and if I pass that same reference point in the road before I complete that second 'one-thousand', then I know that I am too close. Much easier to actually calculate than the 1ft per 10mph.
I guess you're a little slow [sic]... Your math is very good if you're doing 50mph at 5ft from a freaking wall. Then it's good for the genetic pool to slam into it, you deserved that.
In the real life, though, the car in front of you moves at the same speed as you. Since they can't decelerate in zero time, the math to compute the allowed reaction time is a little more complex.
I hear in several european countries, they bring out a big curtain to put around traffic accidents, to keep gawkers from slowing down traffic and causing a bigger mess
Then you have really stupid people. A few years ago we had some paintings on a building by one of our highways (the kennedy expresway). I saw people stop their cars on the damn expressway, literally zero miles an hour in a traffic lane, to take a pic. The areas was close to a curve as well, so not a lot of long distance cisibility.