Maryland clocks thousands of E-ZPass drivers speeding | Hacker News Reader

Maryland clocks thousands of E-ZPass drivers speeding

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14 pointsblueatlas14 comments

New York does this too. It's important to emphasize they are talking about the speed you're going through the toll booth. It's not some tricky thing about measuring your time between two points or anything like that. It's kinda dangerous to speed through a tollbooth.

Thanks, that very much is not clear. I'd expect a very high number of end to end speeding violations.

Thanks for the clarification. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to figure out if you're speeding between two toll booths. They know how long the road is, they can tell how fast you're going. I've often wondered why police don't do more of this. It seems like a relatively easy way of catching a lot of people.

> I've often wondered why police don't do more of this.

Wikipedia claims[0] that this is not allows in California, though the citation has suffered link-rot.

I think enforcing speeding limits could also discourage the use of things such as ez-pass, which may very well result in more revenue, compared to the same tolls collected in cash by real people. So it could hurt the revenue stream from tolls.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit_enforcement#Averag...

This is fairly common in the UK where average speed checks can be found on motorways. The camera systems I have seen were the SPECS speed camera [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_%28speed_camera%29

They probably don't actually want to know what the 85%-ile speed is on their roads, because people could start appealing speeding tickets, and people in crashes could start suing the state claiming the roads are intrinsically unsafe.

Just a guess. But have you ever seen a local government turn down money in order to preserve civil liberties? Pretty rare these days. So there must be some sort of ulterior motive.

Mostly it would lead to fewer people using Ez Pass and more traffic at tollbooths. Anyway, they've promised they won't do that, so that really would be a story.

Average speed cameras are used in a number of countries, though I'm not sure about the U.S.

They are useful for catching speeders in a relatively short stretch of highway, but useless for medium-to-long stretches. Even if you constantly drive at 20km/h over the limit, the average can easily dip below the limit if you stop at a service station for a few minutes or if there's heavy traffic at some point. And if the highway in question doesn't have toll booths, the police will have to install a bunch of expensive cameras at every single interchange.

Are all transponders in classical toll booth format in MD and NY? Here in Florida, most of the transponders are over-highway; you don't have to slow down or pull into a toll booth-like structure.

Tool booth structures are used for cases of mixed cash/ez-pass lanes. Other lanes are ez-pass only and don't have the shown booths.

A toll near me (NC) has cameras and an electronic sensor over the highway; it reads your pass if you have one, or takes a picture of your license plate if you don't so that they can mail you a bill later. (there are no humans, nothing to stop for)

When they first put it in, I noticed there are 3 or 4 of those in-road "buttons" (weight pads?) right in a row under the toll platform. They could be used to trigger the timing of the reader and camera, or I figured they could be used to determine speed quite easily.

So for a while after it was first put in, I would carefully hit my brakes and ensure my speed through the toll was right at the speed limit, then go back up to normal speed. But after a while I got lazy and stopped doing that, since nobody else appeared to be doing the same. "Everyone" was speeding through it.

I never received anything in the mail, and nowadays I rarely go through the toll. But now this article makes me think I could have been right, maybe they are recording speeds (or capable of doing so) and just doing nothing about it.

I'm here in MD and our interstates are filled with these horrible speed cameras.

Anything over 12 mph and bam you get a ticket in the mail. They are making tons of money thru this as who doesn't speed?

They need to increase it from 12 to at least 16mph or more over the limit! If it's 65 on the highway I'm naturally driving close to 80. I don't think I'm alone here either!

If you don't want speeding tickets, don't speed.

> Maryland law allows the agency to revoke a driver's E-ZPass transponder for 60 days after a second violation within six months.

If they can revoke a transponder only of someone from MD, I know at some point you could just buy your transponder from another state. VA, PA, OH, NY.

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