Sumner Shortcuts

Can someone tell me what’s going on here?  This thing keeps cropping up all over Hendersonville.  It’s an odd contraption that is part radar gun, part speedometer.

Which is nice… if you’re incapable of looking at your own dashboard display.  Awfully nice of the local police to tell me what my speed is in a way that allows me to keep driving without looking down at all.  Now if they only had them all over the place… every 500 yards.  Then I wouldn’t need my car’s speedometer ever again.

By the way:  while Gallatin discusses banning electronic billboards out of fears that drivers will be distracted and wreck… Hendersonville’s finest are actually erecting their own “electronic billboards” in these radar things.  Further evidence of the differences between the two rival cities.

Seriously, what is the point of these things, exactly?

I figure it’s one of two things:

1. They think this is a speeding deterrent, that people who look at it and notice they’re going faster than the speed limit will instinctively slow down.
2. They are using this thing for information-gathering purposes… compiling all the data they can on how many people speed–and at what time of day–in certain parts of town.

Honestly, it’s probably both of those reasons.  Trouble is… those are both stupid reasons.

If they’re trying to deter speeders, they might be shooting themselves in the foot.  Just like empty parked police cars, even though some drivers will instinctively slow down upon spotting it… they’re even more likely to speed back up after they’ve passed.

I know I may be a bit of a rebel, but I always feel compelled to speed up like there’s no tomorrow.  I have this strange desire to see how much over the speed limit I can get that radar to read before my car passes it.  Now, I never actually speed up–that would be breaking the law, and I simply have too high of moral standards to do that.  Obviously.  But it doesn’t stop me from feeling the impulse.

I can’t be the only one.

And if it’s driving habit data the police are after, shouldn’t they have enough by now?  These things have been around for over a year.

Hey, what’s to stop the police from rolling out some new technology that combines this radar thingy with those infamous Gallatin Red Light Cameras?  So it reads your speed, logs that you were going too fast, takes your picture, and sends a ticket to your house, all before you’ve gotten even 500 yards past it.

Come to think of it… why don’t we just deputize the sucker and start printing out tickets–the city would make a killing since no one takes this thing seriously.

Robot cops are the wave of the future, anyway, as we all know.  Until that future comes, I’m left wondering what law enforcement is supposed to be accomplishing with this glorified speedometer.