Speed Camera

[Gavin Brown]

Hi all, I’m new to this group and hoping someone can help me.
I live in a small town with a speed limit of 60 kms per hour, we don’t have police monitoring drivers on a weekend being such a small town.
I am wondering if there is a way to set some sort of speed detector at a certain speed and if it is over that speed a light flashes to make the driver think they have been detected on camera. We have a lot of trucks going through our town, once one thinks they have had their picture take they will be on the radio to tell others to slow down.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as one day someone will get killed

Thank you all in advance.

[Andy Chee]

Be aware that light flashes cannot be seen during the day.  In other words, your proposed fake light flash will do nothing to slow vehicles down during the day, and would make zero impact on driver behaviour.

If you really want to do something, you need to collect evidence of speeding, and give it to police for consideration for patrolling, or local council to construct chicanes or speed bumps. 

For example, time stamped motion-activated CCTV connected to a vehicle speed video text overlay, might be sufficient evidence for police or local council to consider action.

Any other vigilante action like fake light flashes will be ineffectual (though I acknowledge that police and council themselves can also be useless!)

[squadchannel]

In Japan, policing conducted by police officers is feared, so just making a scarecrow(decoy? mannequin?) that resembles a police officer will make everyone slow down and obey the law.
Just placing a machine that measures speed, or a police car, or something else that could be mistaken for a police car would also be effective.

[jpanhalt]

I can sympathize with the TS.  I am in what we call an agricultural/residential zone.  That means there are big farms and smaller residential lots.  Trucks on the highway are intimidating and always speeding.  There is probably not a simple solution as truckers follow established routes repeatedly and soon know where such fake traffic controls are located.

As for mannequins, police used to hide behind billboards and other obstructions.  In Oklahoma, I have seen fake, life size billboards of police cars neatly hidden behind the real billboard.  I took that route frequently enough to remember where they were.

Strobe lights on our speed/red-light cameras are easily seen in the daytime.  The problem with a DIY solution is you might need radar or lidar to detect speed, and that use may not be legal for private individuals in your locale.  A passive range finder might work, but that would seem pretty complex to implement.  Simply flashing randomly at passing vehicles might also be considered distracting and hazardous.

[coppice]

I find the idea of 5 day a week policing interesting. Do they operate a 40 hour week? Nobody is allowed to commit a crime after 5PM?

[Andy Chee]

I find the idea of 5 day a week policing interesting. Do they operate a 40 hour week? Nobody is allowed to commit a crime after 5PM?

In urban city centres, police are usually rostered in three shifts; 8am-4pm, 4pm-12am, & 12am-8am, or similar variations thereof.  Otherwise, city police work similar hours to any ordinary 40 hour week.

In rural areas, limited personnel means such rostering may be difficult, if impossible to implement.  The vast distances in rural areas also pose a policing challenge.  This means rural police normally work on a "on-call" basis, with the odd patrol if they have the time.

In summary, rural police operate very differently to city police.

[calzap]

Radar speed signs that display a vehicle’s speed and flash if they are above posted speed are readily available from multiple vendors.  Just google it.  They are available with solar power, so no external power is needed.  Generally, in the cost range of US$1500-3000.  Even cheaper are plain, non-electronic speed camera warning signs.

Mike

[radiolistener]

You can spread a rumors on a local CB channel that a lot of truck drivers in your location were catch with speed limit violation, so they will slow down to avoid to be captured 

Another way is to put some fake radar (which don't detect something just simulates radar carrier), so if they using radar detector they will think that there is radar and will slow down...

Third way is to put some construction which looks very similar to radar (something which looks like radar and camera with battery powered blinking led) at very visible place... 

[CaptDon]

X-band speed radar is kind of old school (10.525GHz), most radars today are in the Ku band. You could get a gunnplexor on the police frequency and use it to trigger radar detectors however you would have to randomly pulse it on for a few seconds and then off because many radar detectors when seeing a steady carrier won't report it as police radar but instead will identify it as a house security alarm. Also be aware that certain road hazard warning signs use pulse codes which allows more sophisticated radar detectors to warn of specific hazards.

[thephil]

Technical side of things

Some ideas that come to my mind:

You could look for an automotive distance sensor and calculate speed in a microcontroller. An alternative could be one of those hand held laser range finders – many also measure speed. E.g. the most expensive one of these: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805031614191.html. One can probably make that work with a microcontroller.

Many years back someone converted a toy speed-gun to a makeshift speed trap and wrote an article in make magazine about it:
https://makezine.com/projects/radar-speed-detector/.

An old camera flash (maybe with a red filter) could create the desired "user feedback".


Legal aspects

I know nothing about law in general and much less about law where you live. However, it may be worth checking if setting up your own private fake speed trap could be some kind of offence...

[JustMeHere]

Just ask the cops to park their cars on the side of the road when they leave for the weekend.   It works.

[IanB]

I am wondering if there is a way to set some sort of speed detector at a certain speed and if it is over that speed a light flashes to make the driver think they have been detected on camera.

Anything installed by the road that looks like an official device will come under the jurisdiction of local highway or police authorities and will likely get you in trouble if it is not put there officially.

However, there are commercial devices that measure your speed and flash a warning if you exceed it. They are installed all over the place in many neighborhoods around the world. You may wish to talk to your local town authorities about installing such devices.

If you are worried about safety, you can also talk to your local police department and get them to conduct a speed check campaign. Once again, this will work better if the request comes from a community or town authority rather than an individual.

[golden_labels]

Make the local council build chicanes like that at each end of the town. Analyse that picture carefully, as both making them effective and not impeding truck traffic requires a specific shape and design. The warning signs should flash at night, as it may be easy to misjudge in darkness.

Google Street View, 52.077° N, 19.665° E (OpenStreetMap)

Another option is building traffic lights, that turn red if they detect a speeding car approaching. Drivers routinely going that route learn quickly, that going over the limit will be less pleasant. Unfortunately only them: it doesn’t work for random drivers, which pass the location only once.

A third option is a speed display, which also displays a warning upon detecting speeding cars. This relies on drivers being reminded of the issue, which works quite well on many. Seems to be least effective, but also least intrusive and cheapest to deploy.

As for building anything yourself: I will join the choir of voices above. It’s likely to put you in legal trouble. Putting aside placing any device in road area without a permission — I don’t know NZ regulations on that — you expose yourself to liability from civil court cases, when something happens becuse of that flash.

[floobydust]

As mentioned, the Mattel Hot Wheels radar gun has been used:
https://hackaday.com/2014/08/18/hot-wheels-toy-turned-radar-detector/
https://www.edn.com/mattel-makes-a-real-radar-gun-on-the-cheap/
It's quite low TX power though but does also set off radar detectors and that may be enough.

Silicon Chip Magazine Dec. 2006 Build a Radar Speed Gun Pt. 2/2