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The Laws of Physics Trump Traffic Laws
New submitter HeLLFiRe1151 sends this quote from Physics Central:
"Here's a practical application for your physics education: using math to successfully beat a traffic ticket in court. Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist based at the University of California San Diego, did just that to avoid paying a fee for (purportedly) running a stop sign. Krioukov not only proved his innocence, but he also posted a paper detailing his argument online (PDF) on the arXiv server."
As a result of this unfortunate coincidence, the O's perception of reality did not properly re ect reality.
It's too bad that statement cannot be quickly supported in many other cases.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Relative to my car, I was travelling at virtually 0 mph!
When another car partially blocked the officer's view of Krioukov's car momentarily, the officer could have missed the brief yet crucial timing of his stop. At least, that's Krioukov's version of the case.
Physics explained what the officer saw (or thought he saw) but another car explains what the officer didn't see (Krioukov stopping at the stop sign).
Years ago I was pulled over by a cop who claimed I was going 45 in a 30, which I knew to be complete bullshit. I was driving a car that could barely produce 70hp under really great conditions, with 500+ pounds of friends in the car (in addition to my own mass) and had just come to a complete stop and made a right-hand turn less than 100 yards prior. In other words, the cop was claiming that my woefully underpowered car from the 70s was accelerating like a modern Porsche.
He handed me my ticket, and I went to the court hearing at the scheduled time, date, and location. In that county the first meeting is with the DA, you have no option to see a judge that day no matter how much you ask for it. That county was over an hour's drive from work, a place I had never visited prior to the date of the offense. The DA made me an offer; take a plea bargain - which would not be reported to my insurance so long as I was not ticketed in their county again for a year (and carrier a lesser fine) - or come back at a later date to plea my case before a judge.
I decided my time was worth more than that, and took the plea. I could have taken the second hearing to plead my case before a judge, but the amount it cost me to drive there and back, plus time taken off of work, was likely more than the small fine I paid them that day.
That said, congrats to the professor for so handily showing the error in the cop's measurement without making them look like a baboon.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The cop had an obstructed view of his car by a car in front of his, he braked very hard, stopped briefly, and then started again. He then used fancy graphs with the judge. Cool, but according to him he didn't actually break any laws. F'n TFS.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The math is wonderful but if you just ask the officer when he's (or she) on the witness stand: "was your view obstructed in any way" and they say "yes" or "partially" you say "I move to dismiss based on lack of evidence." Math not needed.
Are you sure this isn't a plot line the Big Bang Sitcom?
The article was posted on April 1. (Need I say any more?) See the discussion on the PhysicsBuzz blog for details.
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2012/04/physicist-uses-math-to-beat-traffic.html
Because I knew accurately what my momentum was.
I blogged about this earlier today. http://www.ginosopinion.com/opinionblog/?p=834
When I was in electronics school I heard a story about a person with a radar certification that the court would recognize as an expert because of it. He went to court and started talking about radar cross sectional area and angle of refraction of the waves and he got out of the speeding ticket.
The teacher who knew him asked if he was actually speeding and he said of course I was speeding.
You have to like his paper title "The Proof of Innocence". LOL
Gino.
The vast majority of stop signs are stupid and should be replaced with yield signs.
My father was a physicist, and expert witness for automobile accidents (the fees he earned paid for our ski cabin in Breckenridge, Colorado). He also NEVER had to pay a traffic fine for speeding, or other such. Why? Because he was able to prove that the technology used was fatally flawed, and that the speeds measured, in the situations specified, were scientifically impossible! He was able to beat both radar and lidar (laser) speed detectors used to measure his speed. Myself (an engineer), whenever I have contested a ticket for speeding, have been exonerated because the accusing officer did not appear in court. Gotta wonder... :-)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162
The Proof of Innocence
Dmitri Krioukov
(Submitted on 1 Apr 2012)
A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.
If you think this really happened, find a citation for the case that doesn't end up back at this same article.
It turns out that humans are really poor at estimating velocity unless they conform to Newtonian accelerations very closely.. While there has been a lot of research on these issues, I'd like to refer to one of my favorite papers, Sverker Runeson's 1975 paper "Constant velocity — Not perceived as such".
http://www.springerlink.com/content/nt61hh074k7123q5/
Nothing new, I say. I've often seen traffic laws being trumped by nothing less than a generous show of cleavage, which always seemed to defy at least one of the physics laws, namely gravity.
I always get stuck trying to figure out why the triangle has so many sides. It does gives me something to do while I wait for it to turn green.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I once used physics to argue that a speeding ticket I received was bogus. I explained that even if I was traveling at the speed the officer claimed (unlikely in the underpowered subcompact I was driving, since I'd just gotten on the freeway), he could not have caught up with me and paced me at that speed in that short distance. I also suggested that a more likely explanation for the ticket was a bumper sticker which identified me as gay, and the fact that I was leaving a (peaceful) civil rights demonstration. (This was in the Midwest, in the 90s.) I was still found guilty, but the full fine and points on my license were not assessed.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So's your mom.
Sorry, but when some says that something is "stupid", I immediately revert to childish taunts to fit in.
Looking at this and reading between the lines the issue and the reason he got let off has nothing to do with the main thrust of his physics analysis.
1/ He was charged only with not stopping at a stop sign.
2/ The officer did not contradict his statement that at the time he allegedly ran the stop sign the officers view was obstructed.
Therefore the officer cited someone for an offence he could not have observed directly, Case dismissed.
If the officer had also added a charge of careless driving for pulling through a stop sign wile not being able to see approaching traffic, as would seem he should have done from the evidence presented by the defendant.
Then his own evidence of the officers obstructed view would have convicted him on this second count, while exonerating him on the first.
I suspect that if the obstructing vehicle existed as recorded in evidence, then the officer was really trying to cite that other vehicle and the defendant was just in the way of his pursuit and so was just a convenient patsy.
If of course the other vehicle was not even there or did not obstruct then perhaps he got off due to a lapse of memory by the officer, combined with a lack of in-car video recording.
a) a physicist professor (postdoc, well-known in his field worldwide) at my university was ticketed for speeding based on a radar gun reading. In court, he presented an analysis that showed that a radar gun reading would be inaccurate under the conditions where used. The judge determined that the analysis was irrelevant and fined the prof.
b) I was involved in an automobile accident. I was cited for running into the other car. A physicist friend of mine and I put together an analysis based on physics that showed that the other car had to have run into my car. It was pretty cool because it so closely matched what happened (physics works!). However, my insurance company, the prosecutor and my attorney all dismissed the analysis as irrelevant.
Agreed. You guys over in the States put Stop signs at almost every intersection. Was surprising to me as an Australian the first time I drove over there ... in AU we tend to put stop signs only on the occasional intersection where the view of potential oncoming traffic is obstructed for some reason (e.g. there's a tall hedge along the side of the road until just before the intersection). But in the absence of any such obstructions, the ubiquitous Give Way (equivalent to US Yield) sign is used instead.
This, in combination with the considerably lower speed limits in suburban/residential areas, makes getting around suburbia in the US a lot slower than I was used to.
Like so: http://cardriving.com.au/Photo/Driving_straight_ahead_through_an_intersection_on_a_minor_road_Give_Way_sign.JPG
Thank you.
I am John Hurt.
That you don't need to be right, as long as you can explain whatever it is you're explaining in a technical way. I know very few judges that are going to be capable of following this kind of math, especially with some of the wild assumptions he comes up with in the paper. He's intentionally talking over their heads. He could be measuring the diameter and deceleration of a cream puff going to the moon for all they know. Well played.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
This argument is a shameless piece of sophistry.
It's central argument is "I did stop; a car just passed in front of me and you didn't see.". This is then expanded into 4 pages of unnecessary and probably disingenuous over-analysis.
The entire argument breaks down in FIG 5. Leaving aside this nonsense of measuring angular speed(The human brain interpolates just fine), the author compares two curves in which the equated angular speeds of the car do not translate into the same linear speed. Indeed, at the occlusion point at t~1.5 s, the car corressponding to the blue curve would be travelling at 15m/s, verses the car at constant 8m/s that it is being compared to.
And this is even before we begin talking about how the author is really comparing a car at constant speed to one which reverses back into the stop sign and then drives forward.
I think this kind of thing is described as "sophomoric", and in that that word describes a second year student who is full of their own knowledge with no concept of their own ignorance, I would have to label it as such. The cop was right, pay your ticket Mr. Krioukov, and don't darken the door of the maths department for a very long time.
May the Maths Be with you!
I wish cops would just not pick people on the little tiny things and just let things slide, unless its BLOODY obvious.
But arent traffic cops there in the first place because they stuffed up somewhere else and were given the shit traffic job?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"It is widely known that an observer measuring the speed of an object passing by, measures not its actual linear velocity by the angular one."
I would have found him guilty based on that sentence alone and fined him for gratuitous use of a comma and a blatant misspelling.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I was always into photography and this was the 70s. My father got ticketed for parking on a cross walk in our small town around midnight. It was the dead of winter and snow covered all the streets. He wanted to fight it so I photographed the place in the middle of the day showing how thoroughly the snow covered the streets making it impossible to see the cross walks. The judge took one look at the photos and motioned for the cop to approach the bench where he chewed him out for wasting his time on such a ridiculous case. It is possible to fight tickets with evidence but so rarely do people have evidence to fight them with.
This argument seems moot if, as in most states, only one car is allowed in the intersection at a time when a stop sign is involved. Also, what of the 'California roll' that doesn't require a full stop?
Using the officer observed motion of the car compressing the front suspension (dipping) and then springing back to prove forward momentum had stopped for a very short time.
The asst. prosecutor didn't understand physics, so we argued about what springing back meant. Then the judge hit me with every fee she could. Apparently she didn't appreciate having to actually hear something other than the usual litany of lame excuses.
I want to see a future, where you immediately, go online with the cop to a live judge via skype on the ipad, so that there and then can decide if the cop is wrong, then the cop is to pay a fine.
I tell you, the whole justice system , plus the education system and the medical system needs a complete overhaul redesign and be 100% wireless.
Its way overdue for teachers to be obsolete, except helping the 'challenged' few, s burn those text books, put all courses online and exams online, and marking online, what a teachers for again? Keeping the peace? taking roll calls?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"But officer, since I didn't observe the stop sign, it was both there and not there at the same time. It was there after YOU observed it, but by that time I was already gone!"
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Speed limit on the main street between myself and the nearest 24-hr convenience store half a mile away was 45 (I know, I should have walked. But all I wanted was to get it over with so I could sleep). I got pulled over for "drag racing" even though the streets were entirely empty other than myself and a cop waiting on a side road. To be fair, I was getting up to speed limit as quickly as possible so I could get it over with. But I was also "paced" at 60, which means he did not clock me but instead estimated my speed based on speeding up to catch up to me after turning off his side street. He included the streets where all this happened, so this gave me all the distances between incidences that I needed.
I used simple integrals to show the velocity/position relationship, along with the factory specifications of my car. End result is that the judge said he had no idea at all what I was talking about, and the ticket was dismissed because "it sounded right".
Because I knew accurately what my momentum was.
Liar. Just by observing it, you have altered it. Unless your car is made of some bizarre substance that changes its mass in reference to the velocity change you initiated by looking at the speedometer and trying to figure out where you are at the same time.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
of arguing "I did stop, but the officer's view was obstructed by another vehicle and hence he couldn't have seen whether I did or did not" and having the officer agree that his view was obstructed.
That paper has way too few (0) sources to be taken seriously! Sue that bastard! ;)
Now that he has managed to use physics to get out of a ticket for allegedly running a stop sign, he can use an even simpler argument to get out of a speeding ticket, if he is traveling east to west.
Let's say he is going from Spokane, Washington to Seattle. Speed limit is 70 mph, and the cop determines he was doing 85.
All he would have to do is remind the officer that at Seattle's latitude, the Earth rotates west to east at a speed of 707 miles per hour. And since he was moving in the opposite direction of the Earth's rotation, then he was actually traveling at negative 622 miles per hour.
Of course, he wouldn't want to get busted speeding in the other direction after pulling this off, unless he is prepared to pay a super hefty fine for speeding at 782 miles per hour in a 70 mile per hour zone.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Without the maths, the defence is "I actually did stop briefly, but your view was obscured by another car". I would hope that in the interests of justice the simple version would also lead to an acquittal, the judge realising that if the police couldn't see the car at the time there is reasonable doubt. I expect it was more of a case of "wer'e not going to pay for a mathematician to support the prosecution on a trivial case like this.
teacher tried to use physics.
Judge asked if he was Perry Mason.
The whole court room laughed. Found guilty
In the UK, at least, stop signs are incredibly rare. (I live in a major city, and can only think of one, which is on private land not the main road system.) On the other hand, give-way signs (either triangles next to the road, or double-dashed-lines on the ground) are incredibly common; I think those are probably the equivalent of US yield signs, although I'm not sure how direct it is.
And 4-way stops are unheard of; in the UK, if something like that were needed, they'd put a mini-roundabout there instead.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
If you ever see the process for obtaining the driver license in U.S., you'll understand why they stick 'Stop' everywhere.
This, in combination with the considerably lower speed limits in suburban/residential areas
And this, by the way, varies a lot depending on the location (even within a single state). Where I live, most roads in residential areas are either 30 or 35 mph, with an occasional 40 - which makes it same or faster than e.g. Auckland, where, from my memory most such roads are 50 km/h, and very few are 60. On the other hand, driving a few miles to the west would get you to Seattle, where they seem to really love 25 mph signs, and occasionally grudgingly settle on 30.
Stop signs are unconstatutional traffic ticket's are an ilegal tax.
--
roman_mir
... did anybody notice the date in the sideline of that PDF?
If you go up to a stop/give way sign at a fairly high speed and brake heavily at the last second, you're an arsehole. What people do that fail to realise is that they make people on the road they're joining or turning into nervous as hell. They've no idea if you're a late braker or if you're going to pull out in front of them and potentially cause an accident.
If he did drive his car as in that graph, I'd hate to be a passenger in his car with those g-forces. Heck even if he took twice as long to slow as in those graphs it would be pretty unpleasant if he did that every time he stopped. Besides which most cars can only manage ~-0.8gs and that's being done by professional drivers in ideal conditions with no regard for tire life. I suspect if you stretched out the graph for a more realistic acceleration of -0.5gs it wouldn't look more damning than supporting of his argument.
In the UK stop signs are only used when joining or crossing a road with limited view (so you couldn't realistically get a clear view if you kept going). Never understood the US' hatred of roundabouts, they're safer and quicker than 4 way intersections. They simply high speed collisions near impossible.
ARGH! If you have to explain a phrase after using it, don't use it! e.g. "California Stop".
its "retarded" (ie, pertaining to an action that is performed by a persone with three standard deviations below the level of common sense or intelligence of the average population)
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
In the northern hemisphere "rolling stops" become possible due to the reversal of gravity.
The local laws in my area (Alberta, Canada) say you must stop and then *remain* at a complete stop for three seconds before proceeding. A delay that long would have been noticeable in spite of this argument. Are California's laws similar?
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
When another car partially blocked the officer's view of Krioukov's car momentarily, the officer could have missed the brief yet crucial timing of his stop.
If it blocked the officer's view, wouldn't it have blocked Krioukov's view, so he should not have increased velocity again after a microsecond of stopping?
BP loves roundabouts. Every 200m I have to slow down, and then burn more petrol to speed up. In the states, I could drive 5 miles without slowing down. Fuck their beer piss though.
That "proof" is so full of holes. It's sad, and should be illegal, that a judge can accept this without getting it peer reviewed by someone capable of understanding it.
As others have noted the radians per second graph is maybe the same, but the integral of the distances traveled definitely is not.
Furthermore note that his acceleration from the "stop" is the same as his deceleration, which is the maximum rate of the car at 22 miles per hour, per second. So after a little over 1 second he had gone from 0 to 22 miles per hour again. OH REALLY ? He must have had his foot flat on the accelerator, if its even possible for such a small car, is that how he drives ? The cop must also have heard it. Also extremely flawed in that the time of obstruction does not take into account that the other obstructing car was MOVING, or that the bonnet of the larger car would not have obstructed the view. From fig 5, its clear the brief obstruction of the moving car blocked the policemans view for a full two seconds ? Ludicrous.
Laws of Physics were declared unconstitutional by their state supreme court, along with evolution.
Did anyone else notice that the arXiv PDF was posted on April 1st?
I am pretty sure that since there was no accident there was no crime.
I am (and the universe) a pretty strict enforcer of the laws of physics.
-- Terry
I don't know how it works in the 1000s of other cities and towns, but in mine THE POLICE DON'T KEEP THE MONEY. The money from ticket revenues goes to the general fund, just like money from other enforcement fines [health dept, building dept, parking enforcement] and other fees [permits, parking, building, etc] and other revenues [property tax, state aid, grants, etc].
I've been involved in local politics for some time, and I've never heard of a police department that kept the ticket revenue. If you know of one, please provide a citation.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
back in 1991 when I was 20.
A bit different circumstances as the charge was "reckless driving" past a certain special junction. Plus speeding, which I did not contest as I was indeed speeding. I wasn't reckless though, the visibility was good and there was no traffic as it was night (very far up north + summer = light nights).
It didn't work. The judge asked if I had anything to say for myself, whereupon I replied "Yes, I wrote this paper explaining with math and physics why I was not reckless."
The judge sighed, asked if I could present it quickly. I looked at my seven-page presentation with diagrams and formulae - where I explain that in order for any accident to happen someone would have to ignore their stop sign and ram me from the side at >X mph - and said "No."
And was summarily found guilty to recklessness. Lost my drivers license for nine months and hat to pay a few hundred dollars.
Yeah my experience was mostly in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota where 25 is pretty standard on residential streets ... maybe 30 if it's a trunk road.
A not insignificant number of drivers treat stop signs as yield signs already. And a dangerous few seem to think that they mean the other traffic should yield to them if they are a smaller vehicle. What happens when the stop signs become yield signs? What's one level below a yield sign - a "Go" sign?
Read the paper and the comments on the physics site where the paper was originally posted. Several commenters pointed out that he was driving a Yaris, which could not stop and accelerate in the time shown in the paper. Or without doing complete analysis, the other car was moving at about 20 mph or about 30 feet/sec. A car is about 20 feet long, hence, the cops vision was blocked for less than a second, even without taking into account that the time was really due to the difference in the length of the two cars. If you can get a Yaris to go from 15 mph to a complete stop and back to 15 mph in under a second, you should be drag racing Yarises. If you can' dazzle them with briliance, you can baffle them with ...
I'll reply to you.
So if we're talking about devices vs incorrect settings due to various causes, what about if the driver himself has a video camera trained on the road (and maybe even his speedometer?). Police device reports "you did X". Driver device reports "I did Y."
Is that enough to get the ticket thrown out, or will they take the second short cut and say "Nah, our device is foolproof and you fudged yours"?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
When Heisenberg was up for the same $400 fine, they cut in half because nobody could be sure if he was guilty or not.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
good post... and on top that, even if he was driving a tesla or something that can do 15-0-15 instantly, its still not safe.
the whole point of stop signs and anti-running laws in the first place is to promote the safety of pedestrians, children, motorcycles, bicycles, and other automobiles.
assholes like this brag about how they 'beat the system' but when they kill somebody they dont feel so haughty.
And this is why we will end up with black boxes that have gb's of internal flash memory, accessible to any cop ( or insurance agency ), perhaps even in real time via wireless, reporting back our movements for several months in the past.
" its for our safety (tm) "
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've been wanting to use one of Zeno's Paradoxes to disprove that I was speeding (because, officer, motion is an illusion). I haven't had the balls yet mostly since they've been long disproven by calculus.
It's reasonably streamlined in the U.S.. I hated the European bureaucracy of getting one. In Europe they almost universally always let you feel like they did you a big favor by finally letting you drive, and many people feel quite smug about themselves. Later they extol the virtues of such a system in spite of being treated like shit by the same. It's a phenomenon well known to psychology, apparently, can't bother with a link at the moment.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"...he involuntary (sp - involuntarily) pushed the brakes very hard. Therefore we can assume that the deceleration was close to maximum possible"
Altho he doesn't point out these further required conditions, he apparently had another involuntary spasm *immediately* after the first sneeze and pushed the *accelerator very hard*. He assumes engine acceleration equal to braking deceleration, so he's off by a large margin there. And anyway, he is admitting he did not regain full control of his vehicle before careening off again :-). I would have let him off anyway, just for the effort.
I can tell you as a common man that the second you involve yourself with the law, the court, or government in general, you lose. Even if you win in court, you lose. Even if you don't lose money (which is highly unlikely), your loss will come in the form of time, effort, hassle, and privacy.
yeah, it sounds like what may have been obscured is enough to generate reasonable doubt
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
He seems to have an instantaneous reaction time, as does his vehicle. Patent them both immediately.
Generally speaking, highway patrol and state troopers will always cite you for an infraction. Town and city cops will let things slide depending on your attitude.
My experience has been exactly the opposite; it's the city cops that are totally unforgiving asshole revenue-generation machines, while county sheriffs and highway patrol are much more likely to let you off with a warning (and more likely to be kind, pleasant, respectful, and helpful human beings and not just an armed bully drunk on their own power).
Knowledge != Intelligence
California traffic judges are pretty well known for giving the defendent a break if they're put a lot of effort in to their presentation, even if their premise is obviously stupid. Half the time, they'll tell you that point blank. This is from the other half, of course.
They just figure if you put that much work in to it, you've learned your lesson, and hopefully know the line of BS won't work aqain, and will thus stop doing what you got caught doing.
Umm, y'know, if you RTFA you find that the original article was posted to the arxiv on 1 April :)
-wb-
Investigating real crimes is difficult, costly, and dangerous. Furthermore, it doesn't bring money in.
Ticketing traffic offenses is easy, safe, cheap, and brings money in. It is also easy to justify, since it saves lives by keeping people driving safely.
People tend to do what they are incited to do. This is a universal principle of human behavior. A few rare people will allow concepts like justice and servitude to the greater good trump the incentives of their situation, but they are not the norm.
The police are no different.
About ten years ago I was out early on a Saturday morning and came to a stop sign. There was a van stopped in front of me with all four of it's wheels in front of the white line on the road so I stopped behind the van. The van turned right and I turned right after it but was pulled over by a cop who was waiting a short way down the road. He gave me a ticket for not stopping. He said that he'd seen the van stop but I'd driven through the stop without slowing down. I argued for a while but gave up. I paid the ticket too since going to court would cost me time off work which would have cost more than paying the fine. I went back and looked at the angles. From the cop's perspective anyone stopping correctly, behind the line, would be stopped out of his view. When they moved off again they'd appear to pull around the corner without stopping. The only way to appear not to be running the stop was to actually run through the stop but stop forward of the line as the van driver did. It's all about the angles.
Humans need social interaction.
What happens if they don't get it?
Some will end up like Genie.
So a teacher showing you multiple approaches
...can be simulated by watching the Khan Academy video on a topic along with videos by its competitors.
cunningly cajoling you to push your boundaries
Why can this not be done through Internet-mediated interaction?
If you're going to go to the trouble of hiring exam proctors, hiring people to supervise minor children while their parents earn a living, hiring teachers for things that can't be taught online (such as basic reading and writing), and somehow providing online access to poor people, you might as well end up hiring teachers.
Like a linux fag and his sticky OS.
I've only ever gotten 6 speeding tickets - all dismissed after shredding the officer in court for his/her blatant lack of knowledge about how to properly set up a radar-based measurement.
Then again, when you design radars for a living, it's pretty easy to do...
This reminds me of a "brief" associated with Karl Kleinpaste back in the mid 1990's that was used in a number of states to beat "driving without a license". Now having identified another potential source in "The Orphaned Right: The Right to Travel by Automobile" by Ralph Roots, this has reawakend my "mobility rights" interests.
If this passes muster in New Jersey, then it will pass muster in the rest of the USA.
Citizens have the right to investigate if the cops are too incompetent or lazy to do it themselves. While this could certainly get out of hand quickly they may have violated the pathetic letter of the law but in no way are they in violation of common decency.
I've lived in a few Canadian cities which "tried" roundabouts. The problem is that they completely screwed up (and I've seen this in both Winnipeg and Ottawa so I wouldn't be surprised if this has happened other places in NA). They gave the right of way to those entering the roundabout rather than those exiting the roundabout. This, of course, make the roundabout worse than useless. As soon as there is any significant traffic, everything grinds to a halt. To this day I don't know what possessed them to be so stupid, but the result is that everybody in those areas hates roundabouts with a passion.
Sure he was able to win, because he was given a chance to listen to his story with an open mind. It depends on the judge and his mood that day.
I had a cop give me a ticket for the same thing, and I had stopped completely, but because I stopped a few feet in front of the stop sign and from his angle, behind the house , he missed it and thought because I started accelarating after stopping, that I had not even done my stop sign.
I used google maps to explain to the judge the angle he was at, made no sense for him to give me a ticket as anyone stopping a few feet before and not exactly on the line would appear to go through the stop sign.
The judge just smiled and said all the technology in the world wont save me from a ticket, and proceeded to give me my fine PLUS the court costs.
He was lucky is all...the judge was nice enough to let him speak his side and actually thought it through....not all judges do this!!