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Homemade Speed Trap Made By Former UVA CS Professor (cvilletomorrow.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Irritated by speeders in his neighborhood and frustrated with the City of Charlottesville's inability or unwillingness to enforce the speed limit, a former professor in the Computer Science department of the University of Virginia created a program in openCV to track vehicle speed on his residential neighborhood street: "You'll find that almost 85 percent of the cars going by are violators [of the neighborhood's 25mph limit]". This includes a city bus doing 34mph.
A 25 mph speed limit is unrealistic on any public road I've ever seen, with the exception of roads made of cobblestone. It's difficult to drive a modern vehicle that slowly--it takes concentration on your speed that frankly makes you have much less attention to pay to obstacles and hazards... like children.
Odd. My car drives at about that speed idling in third gear. It takes no effort at all. If I want a slower speed I pick a lower gear. It is a high volume production car with no mods.
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
Take some discarded automotive parts (coil spring, shock absorber) and fine steel cable (the original reputedly used piano wire) and run it across the road under tension a few inches above the pavement. Go over it slowly (with the speed set by the shock absorber) and you never notice it's there. Go too fast and it slices the tire right off of the rim.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,