So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…
On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).
Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.
I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.
I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.
My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.
Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:
Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:
I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:
I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.
It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):
So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.
On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:
A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:
41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.
I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.
Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…
Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.
Rob.