How can I avoid getting a speeding ticket with radar?

  • Thread starter karen03grae
  • Start date
In summary, the article discusses a way to make your license plate invisible to radar, and how this could be a problem because it could lead to more fatalities. It also discusses how increasing your speed from 60 to 80 mph could lead to a lot more kinetic energy.
  • #1
karen03grae
79
0
Hey,

I was learning about radar in my physics class; I did some research and found out that there is a coating that can go over my license plate which will not give the officer an accurate reading of my speed. Does anyone know about this?

I have to wait a few more days to find that particular site again.
 
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  • #2
It works best when you drive the speed limit, though.
 
  • #3
I do not agree with the limit.
 
  • #4
That would probably work as well as stating that the signs don't have units on them as they say speed limit 35... instead of speed limit 35 mph, or trying to say that you weren't moving, the world was moving around you and you were holding still.
 
  • #5
fundamentally, i do not see the hazard in moving 85 mph relative to a stationary observer..hehe...versus 65mph
 
  • #6
watch some crash videos they might scare you a bit, although I don't mind doing a little over a hundred in a 40 mph I only have a saturn though, so much faster than that would require more road.
 
  • #7
I've watched the videos. I have been through defensive driving 4 times. Right, I agree. Those 40mph zones are ridiculous. As if going 40 vs 50 would make a difference. I will research that license plate coating. Or move to Germany.
 
  • #8
http://www.hwysafety.org/safety_facts/qanda/speed_limits.htm#1

there is start about speeding
 
  • #9
source in link above said:
8. What is the effect on fatalities of raising speed limits above 55 mph? Institute studies show that deaths on rural interstates increased between 25 and 30 percent when states began increasing speed limits from 55 mph to 65 mph in 1987. In 1989, about two-thirds of this increase -- 19 percent, or 400 deaths -- was attributed to increased speed, the rest to increased travel. 11,12,13

hmm
hard to believe this
maybe correlation rather than causation
 
  • #10
Car-insurance telematics

karen03grae said:
i do not see the hazard in moving 85 mph relative to a stationary observer ... versus 65mph
Excessive speed exponentially increases stopping distance and crash severity. Soon, a traffic ticket may be the least of your speeding worries, as insurance companies are gearing up to remotely monitor individual driving habits and to price unsafe drivers out of the market for car insurance.
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100342



  • According to a recent New York Times article, Acme Rent-a-Car in New Haven, CT fines its customers $150 each time they drive faster than 80 miles and hour for over two minutes. One hapless customer got nailed for $450. Sure, he shouldn't have been speeding, especially in a car that didn't belong to him. Maybe he deserved to pay the fine, but here's the problem: this kind of monitoring will be irresistibly attractive to car insurance companies. It's not hard to imagine that carriers will begin to offer a rate discount to people who agree to let their insurance companies access their cars’ telematics systems. Anyone who doesn't want to submit to telematics monitoring will be out of luck, because rates without the telematics discount will be simply unaffordable.
 
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  • #11
I don't find it hard to believe at all -- but I think following distance is a more important factor. I see so many people blazing down the express ways with following distances that are barely appropriate for a 25 MPH zone. :frown:
 
  • #12
karen03grae said:
there is a coating that can go over my license plate which will not give the officer an accurate reading of my speed.

My first impression is this this can't be done; not with a simple coating. There have been a host of bogus RADAR-proofing schemes, none of which worked. I am guessing that this "technology" claims to scatter the signal to create multiple returns that confuse the receiver. If so, this is an old scam with a new face.

Maybe you can buy a stealth car...
http://www.jamradar.com/stealthcar/

Oh yes, as someone who has spend many hours driving at high speeds, I have one piece of advice: Slow down. Most of my many close calls were only survived because by chance I had a fraction of a second in my favor.
 
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  • #13
Whoever's selling the coating must be fans of P.T. Barnum.

About the only thing I know that really 'defeats' radar is military stealth technology (building/painting the entire craft out of materials that absorb/scatter the incoming radar.) Even with this type of technology, these planes aren't completely invisible to radar, but since they're generally much farther away from the radar source than you would be from smokey the bear with his radar gun, they do the job quite well.

I also don't find the figures on fatalities hard to believe. Increase your speed from 60 to 80 mph and you've nearly doubled your kinetic energy (a factor of 16/9.) Also, above a certain impact force, some of the car's safety features like crumple zones simply don't work anymore, making it more deadly than a simple increase in kinetic energy would indicate.
 
  • #14
The idea was too good to be true..*sniff*...guess I better slow down. I suppose that because I have been fortunate enough to not be in a crash, I do not recognize the danger of breaking the limit.

But I still cannot believe that someone has not come up with an effective means of blocking radar. I had some ideas. If the radar is just perpendicular electric and magnetic fields propogating through space, why not have a different medium (other than air) surrounding your car to slow down the rate of propogation. I'm young. Let me dream. Or have an electric field surrounding my car. I don't think that will affect the incoming radar though...
 
  • #15
I heard that in some states or areas when the raised the speed limit from 65 to 75 accidents actually decreased. Their reasoning was that people felt safe at 65mph and thus were more careless and less attentive. At 75mph on the other hand, people felt like they should be more careful. Any truth to this?
 
  • #16
Saying good-bye to police radar

Ivan Seeking said:
Maybe you can buy a stealth car...
http://www.jamradar.com/stealthcar/
Says that site:

  • The objective of the "Stealth Car Project" is to reduce the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of a vehicle. This reduction of RCS will reduce the range at which the vehicle is detectable by police radar or make it invisible altogether.

I have been clocked multiple times on my bicycle by both automatic and manual police radar (the cops yell, "16 miles an hour!" with grins on their faces). I would think a bicyclist might have a pretty small radar cross section since a bicyclist is much smaller than a car. Getting even smaller, there is also a rumor that baseballs thrown in the direction of automatic police radar guns will produce accurate speed readouts. I wonder if a golf ball might also register.

Since radar is unreliable (in 1999, a Eugene, Oregon cop pulled me over because he had clocked me at 45 and then 30 in a 30 MPH zone; I had been going 30 the whole time and he said to that that I must have been going 45 and "hit your brakes when you saw me"; what is the false-reading rate with radar - 10%, 20%, 30%?), I imagine it may soon be replaced wholesale by GPS-driven telematics. If that eventually happens, a stealth car might function as little more than an homage to the past.
 
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  • #17
The body count of the 55 MPH speed limit?

check said:
I heard that in some states or areas when the raised the speed limit from 65 to 75 accidents actually decreased.
This is a similar study that found that 65 vs. 55 MPH increased freeway deaths but overall reduced deaths when the novel tactic of including non-freeway traffic deaths was included. (In the full text of the study, the authors reasoned in part that the 55 MPH speed limit discouraged drivers from hopping on the freeway where driving is, despite the higher speeds involved, overall safer than on any other type of road.):



  • Accid Anal Prev. 1994 Feb;26(1):49-62.
    Did the 65 mph speed limit save lives?
    Lave C, Elias P.

    Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine 92717.

    In 1987, most states raised the speed limit from 55 to 65 mph on portions of their rural interstate highways. There was intense debate about the increase, and numerous evaluations were conducted afterwards. These evaluations share a common problem: they only measure the local effects of the change. But the change must be judged by its system-wide effects. In particular, the new 65 mph limit allowed the state highway patrols to shift their resources from speed enforcement on the interstates to other safety activities and other highways--a shift many highway patrol chiefs had argued for. If the chiefs were correct, the new allocation of patrol resources should lead to a reduction in statewide fatality rates. Similarly, the chance to drive faster on the interstates should attract drivers away from other, more dangerous roads, again generating system-wide consequences. This study measures these changes and obtains surprising results. We find that the 65 mph limit reduced statewide fatality rates by 3.4% to 5.1%, holding constant the effects of long-term trend, driving exposure, seat belt laws, and economic factors.

    PMID: 8110357
 
  • #18
karen03grae said:
Hey,

I was learning about radar in my physics class; I did some research and found out that there is a coating that can go over my license plate which will not give the officer an accurate reading of my speed. Does anyone know about this?

I have to wait a few more days to find that particular site again.

The only such coating that I know of that is designed for your license plate is only supposed to be effective against photo-radar(Those automatic devices that take a picture of a speeding car, which allows the police to send out a ticket based on the license plate number.) The idea is that the coating somehow "blinds" the camera in regard to your license plate. Without a plate number, the police can't trace the car.
 
  • #19
Lets see those pigs try and catch me in my B-2.

Although, it might be a little difficult to drive around in downtown miami during rush hour.
 
  • #20
Some types of hair spray (along with many commercially available coatings) are alleged to reduce the efficacy of a gatso/truvelo style camera being able to read your number plate, however this is nothing to do with the radar itself (which is of course merely the mechanism used to trigger the camera sequence).
 
  • #21
brewnog said:
Some types of hair spray (along with many commercially available coatings) are alleged to reduce the efficacy of a gatso/truvelo style camera being able to read your number plate, however this is nothing to do with the radar itself (which is of course merely the mechanism used to trigger the camera sequence).

Now this sounds infinitely reasonable. It shouldn't be too difficult to put a grating over the license plate that would become opaque when viewed from an angle of greter than, say, 30 degrees from straight on. I used to have laptops that accomplished that task very well. :biggrin:

Since most of the pictures I've seen enclosed with the tickets seem to be at a fairly high angle, they wouldn't be able to read the license plate, although people on the ground would be able to read it just fine.
 
  • #22
Grogs said:
It shouldn't be too difficult to put a grating over the license plate that would become opaque when viewed from an angle of greter than, say, 30 degrees from straight on.

That's exactly how they work*, as I recall.

Anyone know whether the standard distance between the measuring range and the camera is variable for different speed limits? I'd guess no, I might do some research...



(* - they don't always work, I'm told.)
 
  • #23
karen03grae said:
fundamentally, i do not see the hazard in moving 85 mph relative to a stationary observer..hehe...versus 65mph


1) More likely to lose control.
2) Less likely to be able to stop in an emergency.
3) More likely to lose control when trying to stop in the above emergency.


You must not be very smart if you've had the training you say you have and still haven't figured it out.
 
  • #24
At 85mph I am NOT more likely to lose control-if I am paying attention which I do-. Your first point doesn't even make sense. How can simply driving faster cause me too be more likely to lose control? Unless the roads are wet or there is some adverse condition. Did you mean to say that in the case of an accident I would be more likely to lose control? Your third point? I think so. And secondly, I would still be able to stop in the same amount of time, in an emergency, as if I were not speeding. I DO keep the 2-3 sec rule for following cars. In fact, I comply with nearly all of the rules I learned in my 4 sessions of Defensive Driving...except speeding. And in your 3rd point, more likely is probably a figure like 2% more likely. That's the way I see it anyway. But there is really no way to tell unless a real driver is put in those situations.
 
  • #25
"How can simply driving faster cause me too be more likely to lose control"

Hmmm, Thats easy, the faster you are going the quicker your reactions have to be! The majority of accidents arent your fault, but some idiot who can't drive doing some wild manuvers in front of you while you are crusing in your 911 Turbo! (heh) Now if you are going faster you will have less time to react to the idiot in front of you!

I have driven in Germany (On my way to Frankfurt from the 'Dam) and beileve me at 220KM/h (130mph) you need quick reactions... The thing I never understood about the lack of national speed limits in DE is that there roads arent that great! But the drivers typically were good, for example if there is a sudden reason for people to slow down everyone hits there hazards which enables people to slow down in time!

The thing that's got me tho, was coming back. As soon as you get over the border to the Netherlands again you need to slow right down to 120KM/h which is can be bloody difficlut when you are use to 220KM/h The Dutch police must rack in the cash at the border between DE and NL due to speeding tickets
 
  • #26
What kind of car did you have?
 
  • #27
karen03grae said:
What kind of car did you have?

Opel Zafira GSi (hire car.. hence why I was belting it)
:biggrin:
 
  • #28
karen03grae said:
At 85mph I am NOT more likely to lose control-if I am paying attention which I do-. Your first point doesn't even make sense. How can simply driving faster cause me too be more likely to lose control? Unless the roads are wet or there is some adverse condition. Did you mean to say that in the case of an accident I would be more likely to lose control? Your third point? I think so.

No, you are much more likey to lose control PERIOD. Any number of things can distract your attention and the faster you are going the more likely you are to lose control.

karen03grae said:
And secondly, I would still be able to stop in the same amount of time, in an emergency, as if I were not speeding. I DO keep the 2-3 sec rule for following cars. In fact, I comply with nearly all of the rules I learned in my 4 sessions of Defensive Driving...except speeding.

Oh come on! You cannot possibly be serious. You cannot stop in the same amount of time doing 85 MPH compared to a slower speed. Not only that, the time is not what is directly relevant. Stopping DISTANCE is what really counts. So, the faster you are going the LESS time you have to stop because you are covering more ground per unit of time. 2-3 second rule? Judging by your previous posts, I don't want to give you the benefit of the doubt as to what that actually is. It is X number of seconds per every Y miles per hour.


karen03grae said:
And in your 3rd point, more likely is probably a figure like 2% more likely. That's the way I see it anyway. But there is really no way to tell unless a real driver is put in those situations.


You are not panic proof. You are coming up on a car or group of cars that are doing oh, say 55 MPH and you are doing 85. You have every intention of passing safely. Some other idiot pulls out to pass and you are immediately on their a$$. You hit the brakes, lose control, yadda yadda yadda. You speak of defensive driving. Do you actually know what that is? It can be summed up by saying that you drive with the assumption that every other driver on the road is going to do something stupid. If you were really driving that way we wouldn't be having this discussion.

When they are scraping your guts off of the highway I won't be crying.
 
  • #29
Averagesupernova said:
Some other idiot pulls out to pass and you are immediately on their a$$. You hit the brakes, lose control, yadda yadda yadda.

Yeah, every time someone pulls out in front of me I hit my brakes and lose control. I don't know what kind of cars you drive but the one I have doesn't "lose control" when I apply the brakes. Even at 85 when someone going 55 pulls out in front of me. That would not happen all of the time anyway.
 
  • #30
i always love it when someone wants to pass me going 20mph faster, but then we each come to a stoplight. essentially, all you do is wear on your car faster and burn your gas less efficiently.
 
  • #31
karen03grae said:
Yeah, every time someone pulls out in front of me I hit my brakes and lose control. I don't know what kind of cars you drive but the one I have doesn't "lose control" when I apply the brakes. Even at 85 when someone going 55 pulls out in front of me.

You're utterly ignorant of the fact that the faster you're going, the less room you have for error. The best driver in the world wouldn't be able to avoid a collision if someone doing 40 pulled out directly in front of you doing 90. You're an idiot, I hope you crash into a tree.
 
  • #32
I think the word we are looking for is obstinance
 
  • #33
brewnog said:
You're an idiot, I hope you crash into a tree.

Gee thanks.


I am sorry I ever started this thread.


Only law abiding physics questions for me now.

Everyone have a great New Year...don't worry, I won't be on the road!

--Karen
 
  • #34
Kerrie said:
i always love it when someone wants to pass me going 20mph faster, but then we each come to a stoplight. essentially, all you do is wear on your car faster and burn your gas less efficiently.

but it is more fun... :tongue2:

ok, now i have something to say on a more serious note.

Even IF you had a coating that deflected radar from ur plate...wouldn't you have to outrun the cops in order to get away with it? I don't know where u live, it may be different, but I live in Ottawa, Canada, and here when u speed by a cop they just put their sirens on, drop their donuts, and drive after you until you pull over. Then they walk up to ur car, and read the your liscence plate...with their eyes. So a anti-radar coating on ur liscence plate wouldn't help much. Unless you put it all over your car so that the radar gun couldn't figure out how fast your going.

So, my suggestion is get your own radar so that you can see where speed traps are before you get to them :wink:

or...if u have a ferrari or equivalent THEN you can probably outrun the cops...but I wouldnt' suggest it.
 
  • #35
I think that the leiense plate coating is for photo-radar, not ordanary police doing radr at the side of the road. Photoradar takes pictures of the liesence plates of the cars that are speeding.
 

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