Be careful in your neighborhood with that fast sounding F-car.........

Several people here have posted about neighbors giving them grief while driving home at the speed limit, due to the sound of their cars giving them the impression they were going faster than they actually were.......well......now they might find out how fast you really were going.

Personally....I think this is absurd.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20071023/a_radargun23.art.htm

By Joanne Bratton
USA TODAY

Speeders beware. Your neighbors might have you on their radar. That's the message police departments across the country are trying to send by loaning residents radar guns and turning them into neighborhood speed watchers.

Volunteers can't ticket the drivers they catch breaking the speed limit, but their reports can result in warning letters being sent by police, depending on how fast the drivers were going.

Police say the program is worth it if it can make even a few motorists obey speed limits. "It's one more element of enforcing speed," says Lt. Daniel Furseth of the DeForest Police Department in Wisconsin.

For the past year, the village has allowed residents to borrow a battery-operated radar gun for a week or two, sit on their front lawns and record the speeds of passing motorists.

Typically, a warning letter is sent when speeds are 13 mph over the limit, but it depends on the residential area, Furseth says.

The police department has sent out a couple dozen warning letters, he says. "One parent called and was glad we sent a letter," Furseth says. "But it's not always the kids (who are speeding) — it's the soccer moms, too."

Elsewhere:

•Residents in Loveland, Ohio, are invited to sign up in teams of two or three to use the Stalker II, a hand-held, battery-operated radar gun.

•In the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Ill., residents affiliated with homeowners associations use the radar guns. "Some people seemed surprised. Some took notice and slowed down," says Bob Fischer, director of the Naperville Area Homeowners Confederation. "Others were angry that we were interfering with their inherent right to get to the train station — or back home — as quickly as possible."

•In Shawnee, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, police allow residents to use radar guns on residential streets that are posted 25 mph or less, police Sgt. Doug Orbin says. The volunteer must stay in his or her vehicle while using the radar gun, he says.

•This week, the police department in The Dalles, Ore., started taking names of interested citizens who want to be neighborhood speed watchers.

 

There are neighborhoods in Colorado that have been doing this for years. I don't speed in residential neighborhoods anyway, only bad things can happen.

On the flip side, last year there were utility crews working on my road for a few weeks. I was always very careful to go by slowly. The workers enjoyed seeing the cars. One day, one came to our door and the guy said, "we've been waiting for you to open up that Ferrari!". Sometimes you can't win.

Dave

 

This world is going crazy . Less and less liberties .

 

Could I get a taser to go along with that radar gun?

 

This is absurd!

I can just imagine how many of those reported "speeders" are nothing more than neighbors on bad terms with the liberal do-gooder witch holding the radar gun. These are the same moms with their "children playing" sign from WalMart that self-proclaims a 5MPH speed limit.

Lassie faire!!!

 

Things are starting to go to far, have been for years. We are getting closer and closer to a world where we have no personal freedoms and live in fear every step we take that the color of hat we are wearing might offend someone or land us in jail.

 

Frankly, I wonder how soon it will be when a nasty neighbor turns you in for speeding when he sees you walking up the street. Better yet. You get a warning letter citing you on a day you were on vacation 3,000 miles away.

 

How is this taking away someone's liberties? Liberty to endanger my neighborhood? This gives us an opportunity to police ourselves and maybe let our police patrol worse crime situations than my neighborhood.

There have been a few times that I wanted to take matters into my own hands with punks in my neighborhood. This would give me / others a useful forum to report dangerous drivers. Do you disagree with the phone numbers to call if you see someone weaving in and out of their lane?

Gene

 

Can't wait to see the lawsuits coming from the user of the radar gun when they claim they got some sort of tumor from using it. Doesn't the law require someone to be licensed to emit certain signals including radar.

On the flip side I would love to get one of the radar guns and follow around police officers both on and off duty. That would certainly generate a few letters to mail out.

 

Time to order a Radar / Laser Jammer to piss off neighbors even more. i dont speed in neighborhoods but that is just nuts to allow people to ticket cars.

 

1st gear at 25 MPH should piss off nosy neighbor without breaking the law

 

i was driving through my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago at night and came upon a neighbor walking his dog down the middle of the street. it was dark out and he was wearing black and the dog was black. I thought it was a close neighbor and beeped at him. as i went by, he yelled at me to slow down. I was going 15mph in a fiat 500. up a hill.

i have also had neighbors come to the side of the street and make the slow down motion when i was doing the speed limit in my ferrari. I'm like WTF?

 

This is what I'm talking about, not true threats like stated by some. People over-react & think you are speeding when in fact you're going the limit or lower.

One step closer to having gov't regulated throttles - cars that drive themselves. Scrap the F car & get your lifeless Minority Report jelly bean

 

I'm torn on this one. One the one hand, I don't like neighbors becoming amateur police officers. On the other hand, it honestly pisses me off that more and more people seem to be treating residential streets as their own private autobahn. In my neighborhood, 40 or 50 in a 30mph zone is pretty frequent and I'm literally right next door to a middle school. I guess I'm somewhat guilty of a double standard: I find speeding on a highway accepable (even though one could argue that other motorists are at increased risk of injury) while I find speeding in residential areas despicable.

 

First of all, I don't think any of these "civilian" patrol prosecutions would hold up in court if they resulted in actual tickets. Any police officer will proudly tell you that they're "trained" "rigorously", "extensively" or some other "-ly" word to use their equipment. Even if they aren't, I suppose ("Don't taze me, bro!"). But, honestly, how many tickets are thrown out because the officer didn't calibrate the machine correctly/recently or because there might have been other traffic in the opposite direction that affected the results? Maybe technicalities, but important ones, nonetheless. It wouldn't take a lawyer long to make mincemeat of a civilian-operated radar ticket. Unless, of course, the courts are just going to find you guilty without requiring the prosecution to raise and establish the veracity of the accusations. It's been done in the past, though, with photo radar tickets. Check it out.

So, this is probably just a red herring as opposed to a real threat. That said, there are times and places where speeding minimizes the risk of injury to third parties. A residential neighborhood may not be one of them. Of course, it is now not exactly a safe proposition to "take it to the track", either!

CW

 

More B.S.

*****y people have to have stuff to ***** about. Their lives are not complete unless they complain.

 

For anyone living in the Bay Area, they are implementing this program in Burlingame. I'm trying to find the article from the Daily News, but can't find it.

 

For the past few years, I've been considering this type of "neighbor" as my signal to downshift, and open 'er up, if only for a moment. I've got the same reaction to those lovely speed humps, installed at the request of people who consider any fast-looking car to be going hideously faster than the limit "cuz it jes looks fast". My favorite runs involved having my super-loud-squeek track pads (ear-piercing, when done right) still installed, and easing down, over a good 20 excrutiating seconds, to my usual 5 or so mph to creep over the hump, then WOT off the backside of the hump - preferably late at night. Three humps and a stop sign gone so far, for some reason.
What used to be pleasant, tree-lined drives (several in my area) are now bone and chassis jarring trips.

Sounds like something I would do........maybe from a speed hump, or one of our redundantly overabundant stop signs.

 

In my experience you are always better off calling the police than trying to handle the problem yourself.

That's what they are paid for. They are usually bored to death anyway where I live and it gives them something to do.

this also sets an historical record for use in the future if the problem continues.

Getting into a feud with your neighbors is not the ideal situation. I would like MY neighbors to watch out for my interrests and help with problem outsiders. When a neighbor is a problem call the police. It's always worked for me.

 

That's insane.

I'd drive up and down the street trying to get some ridiculously high numbers on the neighbor's radar gun. They're not cops, so what can they do? cry about it?

 

Bad neighbor relations is never a good thing. See Phil's advice above.

Dave

 

I dont' have to worry about that for a while!

 

I'm down the end of a dead end road, so I don't get speeders at the end of my driveway. But just a block away, things were really getting out of hand. The residents of my own part of town didn't hesitate to run the stop signs, go WAY over the speed limit, cut corners WAY over the centerline, fail to use turn signals, etc. My house is about six blocks from the city police station.

So I sent the Police Chief a polite email, asking him for a little more Police presence in the area. He sent me a polite response, telling me that he had assigned some extra officers to observe and report back to him. A couple of days later he sent me another polite email, telling me that there would be an "emphasis patrol" that afternoon. I walked down the road and had a polite conversation with the officer manning the radar gun. He politely told me that they had issued about 25 tickets in the past couple of days in that area. I said "thank you, officer." When I got home, I sent an email to the Chief, saying "thank you, chief."

Everybody happy except the people who got richly deserved tickets.....sounds good to me!

 

It's on in Portland, lady was sitting in the back of her ML inside of her garage with a radar gun.

A month or so back I had just taken my M3 out of the garage for the first time in a while and it was running a little rough so I gave it some revs at the stop sign, then started going down the street around 22 MPH (but the car still sounded loud). The same crazy lady comes running from her garage telling me to slow the f**k down you f***ing a**hole. No exaggerations here. I go down to the next intersection, turn around, and say excuse me lady I was under the speed limit, sorry that my car is loud. I hear how she "always" sees me in my "fast, good-looking M3" (at least she knows the car) and that her kids could be killed by my reckless driving. I am then tought that its alright to speed, just not in neighborhoods. No kidding? I reply,

"I watch out for kids, as a matter of fact I was hit by a drunk driver as a kid. Perhaps you should park your other car in your driveway when your kids are playing so they don't run infront of vehicles like they usually do. Have a good day"

People need hobbies. Soccer moms need jobs.

 

+1

I read that article on Drudge the other day, and liked the idea. I used to offer my driveway to the police on a regualar basis. Haven't done that in a very long time though.

I live on a busy street. And in the last 15 years it's gotten progressively worse. People are always speeding. My garbage cans last 3-4 months max. My wall has been struck numerous times. A guy died in my driveway after hitting the telephone pole, the first month I lived here. So I got a quick initiation. Another guy had my nieghobors horizontal gate rail go through the cab of his Toyota pickup about 4yrs ago, and missed his head by about a foot. People come flying down Laurel Canyon and lose control at Fryman. Happens all the time. Last year, the garage across the street was taken-out. And that's the 3rd time I've seen that happen to that garage.

But, "hey!" What the heck! I mean, I speed a little too; So I have only marginal right to complain.

Nevertheless.....

That SOB-a-h that screams down Laurel Canyon at 4am, on his (sounds like a) Ducati at well over 90mph, deserves whatever can possibly happen to him. And I mean WHAT/EVER happens.

That lunatic MF used to wake me up 3-4 times a week. I wear ear-plugs now, so I don't hear him. But something about having to do that is just not as right as having the ability to clock that guy and get a picture of his license plate to deliver to the authorities.

Even if he only gets a warning letter!

I'll tell ya.... In "my computer game"? He'd be target practice!

Just my 2-cents.