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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."
Relative to my car, I was travelling at virtually 0 mph!
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
We only have his word that he actually stopped. It would be more correct to say that another car explains why there are multiple scenarios explaining what the officer thought he saw. The only way this really relates to traffic (or other) laws is that western law specifically handles multiple scenarios by stating that the burden of proof is on the accuser to show that the scenario they outlined meets a requisite threshold. Physics is not trumping anything, it merely allows one to illustrate in this case some of those alternatives.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The vast majority of stop signs are stupid and should be replaced with yield signs.
I swear Judge some where in the multiverse I stopped.
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.
by stating that the burden of proof is on the accuser to show that the scenario they outlined meets a requisite threshold
That threshold, in traffic court, is usually just the officer saying so... not actually proving it. So in this case physics effectively trumped SOP.
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).
The officer didn't observe him not stopping at the stop sign. The officer ASSUMED he did not stop based on the state of the car he observed before his was obstructed, and the state of the car he observed after it was no longer obstructed.
The officer should be disciplined for taking that shortcut and citing based on a supposed occurence that were not actually directly observed.
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.
I successfully tried something similar(explaining my way out of a ticket, not math). Cop pulled me over for a busted taillight, then cited me for driving without a seatbelt because I had undone my seatbelt to get my wallet prior to the officer arriving at my window. Thing is, my car(72 Chevelle) had the most annoying seatbelt warning buzzer in the world and it does not go off automatically after a short duration(like modern cars). I explained what I did to the officer, who didn't believe me, so I asked the officer to put the car in gear and tell me if they can drive with the buzzer from hell buzzing at them in its constant high-pitched whine. Cop relented, gave me my fixit ticket, and let me on my way.
Ugg... A police force may not be able to stop a "real" crime from occurring or even solve it once it has. But, It could be prevented by making the police in an area more visible. I.E. traffic tickets generate revenue for the police, safer roads for motorists, and deterrence for criminals. There are more benefits if you are willing to disband the mentality that the police are largely out there to waste your time and their own.
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.
Yep. I had a pal I was with that was ticketed for not stopping at a stop sign. When asked how he could have seen my pal's car given that there was a field between them where the weeds were 1 1/2 feet higher than the height of my friends car, the cop's answer was "I don't know, but i did." The ticket was upheld, as that was apparently good enough for the judge.
I can tell you as a career prosecutor that usually if you want to challenge something in court you need to make sure you imediately ask the court for a jury trial. Otherwise you won't get common citizens to try your case, but just a Judge who has a working relationship with the officers all the time. Experience shows that if a case is tried to a Judge you are most likely to be found guilty. Sadly I once had a Judge say at the end of a morning in court, "If I think they are not guilty, I give them a lower fine." Juries are always willing to let you off if you can give them any excuse to do so.
But many of these cases are moving violations and not subject to jury trials. How do would one go about doing what you say in those cases?
I.E. traffic tickets generate revenue for the police
And this I think is the biggest problem. It creates a conflict of interest. In my area in Pennsylvania, local cops have been setting up ENRADD devices, which are only legal in PA. These devices are basically two beams of light that your car breaks as it moves through, and based on the timing and the known distance of the two beams, they can tell how fast you were going.
Except that they can't. If the beams are set up in such a way that the first beam triggers on your wheel, and the second beam triggers on your bumper, it can greatly over-estimate your speed (they are only 3 feet apart, it can easily clock you at 60mph while you're doing 30mph). Also, being just beams of light, even if installed correctly, a car coming the opposite direction can be the trigger of the second beam, so that can also produce unreliable results.
They set these things up on the busiest roads, virtually guaranteeing they have a nonstop stream of revenue. They line up 5 or 6 patrol cars in a row to pick up people, and they have the tickets pre-filled out as much as possible (including date, officer name, location, direction of travel, and even the fine and ticketed speed). The only thing left to fill in is to copy over the drivers license and car info. They only ticket you for going 5 MPH over, then write in "Actual speed X MPH" according to presumably what the ENRADD device told them. This way there's no points on the ticket, and most people realize that paying a ~ $110 fine is a better use of their time than fighting the ticket in court (I for example am an hourly contractor, it would cost me more in lost productivity than simply driving to the court house, nevermind however many hours I might be inside).
I mentioned that they have 5 or 6 patrol cars issuing tickets - these are township level cops, in some townships that might be the entire police force, spending an entire day individually earning the police force a few thousand bucks per hour. The tickets are pre-dated, so you know they are going to issue every ticket in that stack before going home. The roads are the busiest roads, so they have the best chance of creating false positive readings.
It's absolutely unconscionable that the police force gets to keep the proceeds of their activity. It creates a mercenary mindset. These cops are going to be incentivized not to increase traffic safety, but to earn a profit. Ticket proceeds should be given to state social programs rather than benefit those who are tasked with enforcing the tickets. Likewise seized property and other form of proceed from police activity should not benefit the police force.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
In PA if the posted speed limit is LESS than 55 MPH you cannot be cited UNLESS your speed was AT LEAST 10mph over the POSTED limit.
Title 75 - VEHICLES
Chapter 33 - Rules of the Road in General
3368 - Speed timing devices.
(4) No person may be convicted upon evidence obtained
through the use of devices authorized by paragraphs (2) and
(3) unless the speed recorded is six or more miles per hour
in excess of the legal speed limit. Furthermore, no person
may be convicted upon evidence obtained through the use of
devices authorized by paragraph (3) in an area where the
legal speed limit is less than 55 miles per hour if the speed
recorded is less than ten miles per hour in excess of the
legal speed limit.
If they ticket you for 5mph over then FIGHT IT.
Oh, and KNOW THE LAW. LEO is last person on earth who you should place any trust in.
They serve more arrest warrants than anybody else and are the ones most likely to be visible to the population at large.
That is only because the police refuse to put any real resources into investigating *real* crimes like theft and vandalism. If the police took all of their traffic cops and put them on investigating property crimes instead, there would be a huge decrease in property crimes and we could start putting people in jail for real crimes for a change. How many times have you heard about a friend whos home or car got broken into? These criminals are not brain surgeons. They leave tremendous amounts of evidence behind, but the police dont even bother to collect any of it, much less investigate. My car was broken into a few years back, and the perpetrator left about 50 full prints behind. The cops wouldn't even show up (took a statement over the phone!). My wife was a criminal justice student at the time and had access to a fingerprinting lab. After lifting about 3 dozen prints, a friend of ours in the DCJS ran the prints through the database (only a minor violation...), and sure enough out pops a guy we've never met. Had three prior convictions for drug related charges, and one grand theft! This was strike four, and the guy would have been off the streets for good, but the cops failed completely.
Long Story short, the police need to stop worrying about traffic tickets so much, and start doing actual criminal investigations. At any given point, how many cops are tied up in speeding traps? How many real crimes could be solved if those cops were to spend their time investigating instead of sitting in a parked car...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I tried to use math to defend myself recently when ticketed for using a cel phone in a school zone. As an aside, I was using it legally (hands free) and picked it up after I exited the school zone, the officer said, "you picked it up about 5 feet before the end of the zone."
It was a very, very interesting experience and I pretty much learned the point you just made AC. At the end of the day, in which I defended myself with math/physics the judge said, "I feel like I just had a college physics class. You know, there are two school zones on that street. You may have been in the zone, you may not have. I don't care, you have no business being on your phone on that street. You are free to appeal my decision.
The fine was an annoyance (like 150) but I found it a very interesting experience in how small suburbs within cities make money and how a person going in there to defend themselves has basically no chance.