CopFind - collaborative project to log speed traps | Hacker News Reader

CopFind - collaborative project to log speed traps

copfind.com

13 pointskkim21 comments

Why do I have to register to use?

Yeah, I almost tried it but didn't. I wonder why I feel such a barrier to registration? It just takes 5 seconds, but it feels like there's some other cost.

This is spam. Take a look at where their 404 pages redirect: http://copfind.com/asdf

goes to:

http://myspacegateway.com/

I wouldn't register... seems really sketchy.

How do you (or whoever runs this site) deal with constantly changing locations? How do you deal with time component?

Does this pass the "do no evil", or the "improve users' lives" tests? Unknown speed traps are arguably good for us.

Arguable how?

To my mind they are nothing but revenue generation.

A visible speed trap is far more defensible. Not vague warnings but highly visible specific identification.

Even better put these speed traps where they are most likely to save lives not in locations were they are most likely to catch excess speed. e.g. put them outside schools not on the freeway, put them at the entrance to towns not a mile outside.

The speed trap should ticket everyone in excess of the limit. Currently the police use them and discard enormous amount of minor infringements concentrating on the relatively few high speed infringements. This is masking the true nature of the data i.e. the speed limit is too low. Teh correct course of action is to raise the speed limits in certain areas e.g. freeways and rural.

Lastly, tickets by camera should not be part of a police forces performance reviews, they should be noted but not used to justify or discredit anything about the forces performance.

Of the traffic tickets I and my friends have received, most were useful in actually reminding us to drive more carefully. Occasionally you hear of someone getting an unfair ticket: I think that's the exception rather than the rule.

I hate getting tickets as much as anyone else, and I've gotten my share of them. But I still don't use radar detectors, and won't use this service.

"A visible speed trap is far more defensible." As long as the speed limit is clearly visible, why should the trap itself be visible?

If you are happy with the posted speed limits and see the police as only law enforcement then nothing I have to say will make a difference.

Yes looks like we disagree on that, hence our differing conclusions. I believe the speed traps do more good than harm.

You have to admit that this service's tag line "find cops before they find you" does make the user sound like a criminal :). They've gotta change that.

People break the law. People are fined. You call it revenue generation. I call it being smart. Can you really propose that if police know where to catch people committing crimes they should avoid the place and not go after these people?

There are more crimes committed than the police can ever keep up with. So they prioritize crimes of varying types.

Why have they prioritised ticketing members of the public on the freeways for minor speed offenses?

The freeways are the safest roads by an order of magnitude when measured by accidents per mile traveled.

Going 10mph over in a 60 mph compared to ten over in a 25 is a trivial increase in speed and danger.

The freeway speed limits were set due to a temporary economic condition, why do we still have them?

A blanket speed limit is madness when taking into account differing vehicles and differing driver abilities. A trained police pursuit driver with ten years of high speed escort duty, driving a modern porsche on a day off is limited to the same speed as a new driver in a 20 year old POS.

So in answer to your question, yes the police should not use cameras or speed traps on the freeways and rural roads. A marked highly visible patrol car is a much better solution.

Instead the police cars should be in town controlling speed where it is most likely to be fatal, should be concentrating on tail gating, should be prosecuting inattentive drivers, ticketing drivers with no lane control etc etc.

Ticketing drivers on freeways for speeding can only be for one of two reasons either it's $$$ or it's bumping up the arrest/prosecution figures.

To be fair, I've found cops check for traffic violations more in safe areas (e.g. Silicon Valley), than in unsafe areas (e.g. Berkeley/Oakland) where cops are busy busting real criminals. So they do prioritize to some extent.

In the Silicon Valley area, I've seen more in-town speed traps than on the freeway; I received one citation for 40 in a 25mph zone, and had other close calls. Maybe it's different where you live.

"...should be concentrating on tail gating, should be prosecuting inattentive drivers, ticketing drivers with no lane control etc etc." They probably don't do this as much as these violations are more subjective and harder to prove in court. Also there's some correlation between people who speed and people who tail-gate, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, something like this would definitely pass the "free press" test. Free press being an important component of democracy, which is where the "arguably" in "arguably good for us" is actually put to use.

Startups are getting pretty marginal.

Good idea, Bad technology, Bad implementation. For this to add value it must me something totaly mobile. It has to be a small GPS app that user can have on their phone, that detects their proximity to one of these spot and send them a text message or gives them a call.

Or what if you could tell it routes you normally take and at what times, and it will email or text message you if there is cop activity. Maybe you could just subscribe to a road or a location?

Even better: your phone will check for cops on your way, using GPS. When you locate a cop, you can report him in real time, and someone driving 200m behind you, using the same site, will get an alert.

Phones don't really have GPS though, right? And there's no easy way to write software that uses it even if it is there.

The phone network can locate your phone - so your phone can also know its location even without GPS. If your phone knows your location, and is connected to the web, it can work.

If you can tell me how to do this using only a website (no phone specific programming) it would dovetail nicely into a startup idea I'm considering.

I figured it would require getting users to install my software on their phone somehow, dealing with phone companies, and learning something called "Symbian".

quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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