Sunday, January 3, 2010

Police Now Using Airplanes To Catch Speeders

In these economic hard times it is getting harder for local municipalities to maintain their current levels of services with their shrunken tax revenues and it is forcing some of them to think outside the box in terms of coming up with new ways of generating more money. The latest idea some have come up with is to track and catch speeders using airplanes that monitor traffic from the sky. The way it works is like this: They paint lines on the highways every quarter mile and with the use of stop watches pilots will monitor how long a specific vehicle takes to get from one line to another to determine if the car is speeding. If it is determined that a car is in fact speeding a description and location of the vehicle is then radioed down to ground units who will then locate and stop the car and then issue the ticket. They are not using helicopters but rather fixed winged Cessna airplanes which are much quieter than choppers when they fly. The state of Florida has seven craft dedicated to this purpose and is thinking of expanding. These methods have been credited in Florida with the issuing of over 45000 tickets last year about 38000 of which were speeding related. The rest had to do with stopping vehicles that were driving erratically and drunk driving. There are currently 19 states that have similar programs running including California and New Jersey and that number is likely to expand in the future.

No comments: