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Chicago Court Throwing Out LIDAR Speeding Tickets
bridgeco writes "Chicago Traffic Court Judges have been throwing out speeding cases in which the driver's speed was measured with a LIDAR. Judges are asking for a special 'Frye Hearing' to determine the accuracy of these devices. Many motorists nabbed for speeding by a laser gun, instead of radar, are seeing their tickets thrown out at Chicago's traffic court because of a legal issue that the city's law department has been unable to overcome. Within the past year judges in Cook County Traffic Court in Chicago determined that speeds captured by lidar were not admissible because the devices had not been proven scientifically reliable in an Illinois court, said Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the law department, which prosecutes most speeding tickets in the city." (Here's some background on LIDAR from Wikipedia.)
Another problem with using frickin' lasers is that you have to trust the sharks to use them correctly.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-speeding-tickets-09-nov09,0,7869040.story
With a name like LIDAR, who would doubt the radar's claimed speed?
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009910220360
mu
LIDAR; bred for its skills and magic.
I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, but allow me to introduce myself. I'm Colonel Tribune, the Web ambassador for chicagotribune.com.
Looks like the Tribune Co. is really embracing the interweb...
Meantime, I hope I run into you surfing the Web. You can find me on Twitter and Facebook.
...I wonder if Colonel Tribune prefers Farmville or Mafia Wars?
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
The link doesn't work. On the other hand, there's a very nice 404 page. It's funny, friendly, and attempts to be informative.
Good error handling is something many of us don't always do well.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
Are they also going to review marriage applications that were rejected because of a civil servant's gaydar?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
[$group] failed to go through [$procedure] to have [$new_technology] legally recognized by [$other_group]. As a result all results recorded by [$group] using [$new_technology] are considered legally suspect by [$other_group].
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-speeding-tickets-09-nov09,0,7869040.story
I find being offended by me offensive.
The point is, LIDAR is reliable, at least as much as RADAR is. This is just a legal snafu, they will throw out enough that there will be incredible pressure to figure out the legal problems, they will figure them out, and then LIDAR tickets will be enforced again. Never underestimate the power of a determined vendor that has been harmed or the importance of sunk costs in equipment for an agency with very limited funding. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, please.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Reading TFA, it doesn't state how many cases were thrown out, or indeed the percentage of people caught speeding found with LIDAR technology.
In the UK we have a plethora of fixed speed cameras; it's uncommon to travel down a road with a >30 mph speed limit and not see one, but as far as I am aware, police on traffic duty here still use RADAR based speed detection guns. What is the benefit of LIDAR? Is it more accurate, or just easier to 'aim'? It mentions in the Wikipedia entry that LIDAR is able to reflect better off non-metallic objects, like aerosols, clouds and even rain, that doesn't exactly sound like the ideal tool for the application...
How would one find out if LIDAR has been proven accurate in my state (AZ)?
Here's a working link to the article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-speeding-tickets-09-nov09,0,7869040.story Note: The forward slash at the end of the link in the summary is what is throwing off chicagotribune.com
In fact, cars [...] can't even hold still against the Earth's natural rotation
So thats where it went. I thought the worst when I left my keys in the ignition.
I just got a radar ticket in FL and plan on fighting it.
The thing that pisses me off is that these cops aren't policing anything, they're tax collecting.
Florida is one of 50 states yet hands out 15% of all traffic tickets.
They think they're doing good and generating revenue but they're hurting everyday innocent Americans.
When you hand out tickets, only the greedy insurance companies win.
I don't even think I was speeding, they said I was doing 62 in a 45 but my ticket has both of those fields blank... possibly because he "cut me a break" and gave me a "violation of a traffic control device" (the speed limit sign).
They always say they're cutting you a break but they're not.... its still points and your insurance goes up.
All states, and Florida in particular need some kind of reform, or give the police more money so they don't need to go stealing it from safe drivers.
Go out and stop real crime.
Explain what your point is exactly, as applicable to the real world?
You can actually figure out which of the two has occurred with energy conservation.
If you'd hired sharks, they would be used properly. They obviously hired mutated sea bass here.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
There is no absolute speed or stationary point. If I drive at 100 mph, I could say that I got in the car, floored it, didn't move an inch while the Earth went 100 mph the other way.
Not unless you well above the Arctic circle. Here in moderate latitudes, you'd need a car able to hit about 700 miles per hour to stay stationary with respect to the Earth's rotation-- a lot faster, if you want to stay stationary with respect to orbital motions
I'm glad somebody is standing up to this junk science. Remember, the so-called "Doppler effect" is nothing more than a theory. There are still many unanswered questions to resolve before it's conclusively proven that we can measure velocity of solid objects with nothing more than ethereal laser beams. Correlation is not causation. These self-appointed "physicists" can't even get their act together on whether laser beams are waves or particles, for crying out loud! How can they get away with fining people if they don't even know what they're emitting?
We're talking about science here, not your night emissions.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
...in that because its beam is so narrow, that the speed measured is more precisely the speed measured between the target vehicle and the LIDAR gun itself, not necessarily the forward speed of the target vehicle down the road. Since the patrol officer is always sitting off the side of the road, that introduces what's known as the "cosine error" which is actually in the speeder's favor since the LIDAR device will show the officer a slower speed (vehicle's actual forward speed times the cosine of the angle between straight ahead vs a line between the front of the vehicle and where the officer's LIDAR is actually located). Most of the time, the cosine error is negligible, but if the officer is sitting far enough off the side of the actual roadway and the angle is big enough, the cosine error can be several MPH in the speeder's favor.
This still has the sound of defendant intimidation. While it may be true that the judges are throwing out these cases, in every case where the city government asks for a Frye hearing, the procedure intimidates the defendants into just paying the fine rather than trying to stand up against unproven technology.
I have the solution!
It was Colonel Tribune, with the forward-slash, on the URL.
The thing that pisses me off is that these cops aren't policing anything, they're tax collecting. Florida is one of 50 states yet hands out 15% of all traffic tickets. They think they're doing good and generating revenue but they're hurting everyday innocent Americans.
Someone has to pay for their gas to go answer domestic violence calls. If you don't like paying tickets, stop driving. I have used mass transit for a decade now, and I haven't had a single problem with tickets...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Why is Slashdot so obsessed with reporting about speeding tickets and other moving violations? It doesn't seem to fit particularly well with the stated intention of the site.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I would be more concerned with the legality of MPH Industries' radar POP mode. In summary, the company is marketing radar guns with a mode that allows officers to obtain speed readings that are at best, inaccurate. Of course, the only place a warning about the inaccuracy of this mode is found, is in the radar's instruction manual. How many police officers do you think read the instruction manuals that accompany their equipment? Reports of people "getting POPped" have shown up in WV, OH, GA, NV, NJ, and NY.
"POP is mode that emits a very brief (67 millisecond) pulse of radar to determine the speed. Its meant to defeat radar detectors. It works because the local oscillator sweep (the "tuner") in most detectors, (especially cheap ones) is too slow to notice this brief pulse. Newer and more expensive detectors have solved this by making a little detour during the sweep to check for POP. It's like flipping through the channels on your TV, but going back to check if your favourite show has started on channel 2 every so often. Except in a radar detector this is happening hundreds of times per second.
POP can be inaccurate because the electronics in the police radar don't have time enough to stabilize. It's like suddenly jumping on your bathroom scale. The pointer with fluctuate violently until it settles down on the the true reading. With POP it can sometimes indicate an inaccurate speed due to this instability. "
grep -iw skynet
That happened to me once in Mobile, Alabama. I pulled into the far left lane on I-10 to pass a car in the next-to-left lane. I got about halfway done passing them when a cop whizzed up behind me. Not wanting to get a speeding ticket, I slowed down to 55 MPH. Of course, the car to my right did the same thing, and we ended up side-by-side.
Not really wanting to be stuck in the left lane, and not wanting to get a ticket, and since the guy next to me wasn't slowing down, I slowed down to drop in behind him and let the cop past. When I did, he turned on his lights and pulled me over. He proceeded to lecture me about how the far left lane was a passing lane, that when a car comes up behind me like he did, I needed to speed up and get out of the way, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, I totally agree with him. That's precisely what I do under normal circumstances--avoid cruising in the left lane. People who do that drive me nuts. Of course, I guess the significance of the fact that he was a cop was completely lost on him, that the reason why I was engaging in this behavior was because I was afraid that he'd give me a speeding ticket.
Truth is, I have very little respect for traffic cops for that kind of crap. Just last night, I was in gridlock at an interstate entrance in Atlanta, Georgia. No one could move anywhere because of how stupidly they have the entrance ramps and the lanes configured on the interstate. At the particular entrance ramp I was trying to get onto, people habitually engage in extremely frustrating and dangerous behavior, such as blocking intersections, pulling left into an intersection from the right lane to get around someone waiting for a light, etc.
Meanwhile, there's an HOV entrance that dumps you right in the right place if you're trying to get on I-85 that is virtually unused. As a result, people trying to get on either of the two main arteries out of town, I-75 and I-85, have to cram onto a one-lane entrance ramp that is completely blocked because just after getting on, people are having to muscle their way to get in the right place since the interstates split about a mile after the ramp.
So after sitting there for around 15 minutes and not moving, I took the HOV entrance ramp. There were two cops at the bottom giving people tickets. Fortunately, they either didn't see that I was alone, or they were busy with the people they were ticketing, because I got away with it. And you know what? In the same situation, I'd pick safety over the law any day. The fact is that in my opinion, those police officers should have been at the top of the entrance ramp directing traffic, not at the bottom creating more problems.
Of course, directing traffic at the top of the entrance ramp would have only resulted in more safety, not the revenue generation of $150 HOV violation tickets. So guess which one they decided to do.
The worst was one night when I saw a cop in the right lane watch a guy swerve across three lanes and onto an exit ramp because I guess he just noticed he was supposed to get off. I damn near slammed into him. The cop just kept going like nothing happened. I guess he had met his quota for the day.
Anyway, yeah, to hell with 'em. It's too bad, because I normally have a lot of respect and admiration for people who put their lives on the line for us every day. But these guys are just a bunch of tax collectors with guns.
Lawmakers and people don't know shit about science and technology. There is no absolute speed or stationary point.
But there are relative speeds, which is why your vehicle's speed is always considered to be relative to the surface of the earth.
Lawmakers may not know shit, but you know just enough to fail to notice the blindingly obvious.
The enemies of Democracy are
This still has the sound of defendant intimidation. While it may be true that the judges are throwing out these cases, in every case where the city government asks for a Frye hearing, the procedure intimidates the defendants into just paying the fine rather than trying to stand up against unproven technology.
What else is the government supposed to do? The admissibility is being challenged by the defendant so the prosecution agrees to a Frye hearing to defend the admissibility of the lidar readings. When the defendents challenge the lidar technology, they're requesting a Frye hearing so the prosecution agreeing to one isn't intimidation.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
The nice thing about LIDAR is that unlike RADAR, I don't need a license to operate a jamming device. After all, it's just an extra "headlight".
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
your vehicle's speed is always considered to be relative to the surface of the earth.
"I just clocked you going 1.4 million mph relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background in a 35 mph zone. Do you know what the fine for that is?"
"Less than the fine for downloading an MP3?"
Why not just seek a state law that explicitly recognizes the eyeball judgment by the ticketing officer as scientifically reliable?
It is pretty easy to stealth mod your car. I noticed that in all LIDAR training videos the instructor always picked out white cars. So start by buying a black car. You will also need a camcorder with night vision (the one you already have probably have a button for this) as well as a IR remote control(The camcorder might have the IR diodes built in already). A LIDAR operates at 904n, just outside the visible spectrum. Check that the paint is black by viewing the car at night with your camcorder. Black is usually black also in IR. Some other colors can also be black at 904nm. White and red are usually not.
Take a visible laser pointer and look at your car in the dark eyes only as a first survey. Especially front, but go all around. Keep it next to your head to see all retro-reflective parts. You will see plates and light assemblies are the big reflectors.
1. Cover your plates with IR blocking plastic. All new window material for construction has a thin metal layer for IR block. This will work fine. Use a frame over your plates to make them as small as possible as well.
2. Get rid of all retro-reflectors in the light assemblies. They typically look like tiny pyramid pattern molded into the plastic. The easiest way is to just sandblast the area until dull. Don't sandblast the outside. Take them of and sandblast the back. Test with your laser pen.
3. Look at the car with you camcorder in nite-mode. Remove or use a dull black touch-up paint to cover any strong reflections. If you have six large reflectors on the roof, just take them off.
4. Always drive with high-beams on, especially in daylight. Halogen bubs emit a lot of light at 904nm, and drowns the reflected laser.
The result is often >20dB signal attenuation. That means you will be 10x closer to the LIDAR gun before it gives a reading. If you have a laser detector, that is more than enough time to slow down. Usually you will notice that your car avoids any attention as there are better targets around you.
Drive safe!
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
This is a guess but we probably don't have the tech to do signal processing at the ~400THz / ~800nm range that LIDAR operates at. After all the ideal antenna length is proportional to the wave length so meter or centimeter wavelengths are manageable, but nanometer antennas would be hard to construct. (I am not a radio engineer. This is only a guess inferred from the physics.)
Not one comment about it being called LIE-dar?
The nice thing about LIDAR is that unlike RADAR, I don't need a license to operate a jamming device. After all, it's just an extra "headlight."
You'll make the cop's day, broadcasting your approach.
You'll make the judge's day trying to explain how your jammer is a practical - plausible - source of illumination - and not interference with a police officer in the lawful performance of this duties.
Congratulations.
You are now in misdemeanor territory. Keep on trucking, and you just might get bumped up to the felony charge.
Yes, the high-beams are not LIDAR jammers. They just make the high-beam reflectors a poor area to point the gun. High-beams are still effective in lowering the useful range of laser guns assuming the retro-reflectors like license plate are covered. The high-beams may emit 1kW/steradian, of which more than 1W is in the 904nm bandpass. The laser reflection is maybe 500nW. That is a lot of white noise to dig the signal out of.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
...when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away.
MOD ABUSE -- responding to parent post is not off-topic.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Another example of the inability of law to keep pace with technology, even old ones as LIDAR.
11/16/2006 is when this was reported:
Massachusetts State Police Offer Cops Money for Tickets
Court system and insurance industry pressures Massachusetts State Police into giving cash overtime bonuses for writing traffic tickets.
Police unions are up in arms over a Massachusetts State Police offer of cash for traffic tickets. Under a program that became public last week, troopers are given a 1.5 hour bonus on their time sheet for writing a ticket, but only one hour for a written warning and just half-an-hour for a verbal warning. The move cuts in half the amount of credit given for the verbal warning and brings troopers half-an-hour closer to lucrative overtime payments for every ticket issued.
The Boston Herald reports that insurance companies and the courts had pressured police into making the move because both make millions from traffic fines. The overtime bonus payments can increase a trooper's hourly wage by 50 percent, or even double it during holidays.
Union officials in the Western and South Shore areas where the program is in place told the Herald that the program eliminates officer discretion and that, like a ticket quota, troopers are being threatened with punishments for failure to issue more tickets.
"I absolutely refuse to write tickets unless somebody really deserves it," one trooper told the Herald. "You think twice before you take $600 out of somebody's pocket."
Source: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/14/1460.asp
Can't use it in court because it hasn't been proven in court. Okay, not exactly circular, but the easy way out is to just prove it in one of these traffic cases, assuming such proof is possibly. Probably worth it to the city and/or state to go to the expense for one simple case so that it can apply to all the others. Woe to the person who has to sit through that trial though just to try to get out of their ticket.
Anyone who thinks speed traps are useful for anything other than revenue generation are fooling themselves. For example, heading INTO downtown Austin this morning on my morning commute on I-35, with the thousands of other cars going that direction, what do we see? Revenue Generation in the Southbound lanes (driving away from downtown...i.e. nobody but a few stragglers). Cops giving speeding tickets to people who are driving probably 72 in the 65.
If the cops are here to protect us, they'd be on the other side of the highway where all the traffic is, and enforcing safety by ticketing tailgaters and illegal lane changers, not picking on the one or two guys going the other direction, endangering nobody.
I worked with the National Motorist's Association on the LIDAR test cases in NJ. Here's the deal. Laser sends out pulses. It must get back a certain number (64, this may have changed) consistently to read a speed. This is also why laser jammers work-they pulse back inconsistently. Since LIDAR is aimed at faces, it must be eye safe, hence very low power. This is also why LIDAR is easier to beat than instant on radar, for those who drive paranoid. Now, the computing method they use is apparently not patentable, but is proprietary. It was described as a "least squares method", which is why they don't want to release the code and why when this is challeged, they get an expert witness in Court who discusses how they use LIDAR on the Shuttle to measure distance. I used a LIDAR to measure distance in my backyard to string up some ham radio antennas, but that's not on the road. On the road, the device must read the reflections, over 1200 feet max, at the speed of light. The "internal self test" is not sufficient legally....Breath testers have an external calibration ampule...Radar guns have "tuning forks". The LIDAR is a self authenticating device, which is normally not sufficient under the law. In NJ, the presiding Judge set up tests, which being run by NJSP, surprisingly found the device accurate. Other states have just passed laws stating that LIDAR readings are accepted. In NJ, the maximum distance allowed is 1000 feet. In any cross examination, I always get the cop to admit there is no speed readout from the gun, no matter what the distance tests and internal self test show on the LIDAR. In most Courts, they hear "laser" and just think 'radar' but that's not the case. Lidar was the result of GEICO rescuing LTI, a small startup company going under. They gave LIDAR to cops in all 50 states, complete with press releases, etc, which jump started the company, made money for GEICO, and was a PR funfest for the local cops.