Stuck in traffic for 7 hours

Thousands Sat In Their Cars For 7 Hours Tuesday As Police Played Blame Game

On July 24, an shut down County Road 39 and Sunrise Highway in Southampton creating "sheer agony, bedlam and confusion" for hours for trapped motorists.  "I feel trapped,” one woman said. Another motorist said,
“I have children that are hungry, thirsty; 95 degrees in the car, and we have no gas and nowhere to go.”

Authorities passed the buck as Village police blamed the state police who in turn blamed the town police for closing the highway to clean oil and clear debris from a collision between a car and a garbage truck. Motorists were left in the dark and waiting, and waiting.

Nearly seven hours after the roads were closed, traffic began to ease.

When a reporter (who was stuck in the jam) questioned officials, would traffic be like this during a hurricane evacuation, the Suffolk County’s Office of Emergency Management responded, No way, in case of a real emergency "a coordinated effort would take place bringing all the response agencies together operating on one specific plan.”

[Now think back to Hurricane Katrina and the "coordinated" effort in Louisiana. If police cannot handle normal events, don't expect better performance during a crisis. ]

The Red Cross recommends that everyone be prepared for traffic events like this by having a go bag with you in your car. Keep snacks, water and a working phone in the car at all times and try to keep the gas tank near full.

You can't touch this

Some modern medical tests use radioactity to trace blood flow during a stress test, thyroid activity, etc. This leaves the patient mildly radioactive for 1-3 days depending on the test or procedure. Under such occasions the doctor will give the patient a card attesting that they have had a medical procedure involving a small amount of radioactive material. Don't lose this card!
You may set off alarms in the airport. Or be stopped at check points to prisons or military bases. Recently a firefighter in Connecticut was pulled over by a policeman after he set off a radioactivity detector in the state police car. The fireman was impressed,  "I had no idea the police even had devices like that." He showed his medical card to the police officer and was allowed to go instead of being held as a suspected terrorist.

"No Tags" Vanity Plate

The Consumerist relates the story of a Washington DC resident who for 25 years has owned vanity plates on his car that read "NO TAGS". It was all good fun until he started receiving thousands of tickets for other cars. When an officer writes a ticket for a car with no licence plate, he/she may write "No tags" and the computer was matching this to the car with vanity plate "No tags". Every few months the car owner takes time off from work to go to the courthouse to get the tickets dismissed.

"It was funny at the time, but now it’s gone to the point, hey, I'm losing too much time off of this," the car owner said.

When asked why he doesn't get a different license plate, he said, "’Are you going to buy me new tags?’  They say, ‘No.’   I say, ‘There's no need for me to buy tags I already have.’ If you pay for it, I'll change them. If not, fix the computer."

Bottom Line

Stubbornness has its own cost.

Do a Good Deed - get a ticket

"The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers."
- Dave Barry

Today I was asked to help our local Boy Scout troop with their merit badge for emergency preparedness. One requirement on the list was about training and safety for traffic and crowd control. This made me shake my head.

As WEVR (Westchester Emergency Volunteer Responders) my wife & I had a training class on traffic control. The policeman who taught the class urged us NEVER to direct traffic. We were not authorized and if asked to direct traffic, would not be immune from lawsuits for any traffic accident we caused!

Police are serious about their authority when it comes to directing traffic. Last September a major traffic light went out in Pasadena, CA at Fair Oaks and Huntington avenues. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile and it took more than 30 minutes to get through the busy intersection. At this point Alan Ehrlich acted like a good Boy Scout, put on a bright orange shirt he had in the car, grabbed a couple of orange safety flags, and began directing traffic. [I wonder what his day job is?]

Ehrlich cleared up the mess in 10 minutes. Five minutes later the South Pasadena police showed up and gave Ehrlich a ticket ($193) for "pedestrian on roadway" and ordered him to stop. Did the police take over at that point? No. The police told him that they are not required under California law to regulate the traffic and they left the scene trusting instead upon temporary stop signs to control traffic.

Police and the city of South Pasadena say they currently have no plans to change their procedures. Ehrlich disagrees, “We have limited resources . . . we need to prioritize them. One of the major intersections out at rush hour in our city should be a priority.”

Bottom Line

Are stop signs enough at a major intersection when the lights go out? I'd say not, but California has other ideas.

Prey for both criminals and bureaucrats

"the book To Serve Man,
...
it's... it's a cookbook!"
- from Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Man

Here's a unsettling thought submitted by a perceptive reader to Instapundit,

Local governments are clearly shifting from chasing criminals to chasing revenue. Which, from the point of view of their own self-interest, makes a lot of sense.

Let’s say that you are a local government, and you think of your budget as YOUR resources and not those of your constituents. You have a choice of two broad strategies (or a mix thereof): either pursue actual criminals for CRIMINAL OFFENSES, a process which requires the expenditure of resources and can be hard/dangerous work. Or you can pick on generally law-abiding citizens for civil offenses via revenue light cameras, roadside BAC [Blood Alcohol Count] screenings, “driving while talking” laws, seatbelt enforcement, aggressive parking enforcement, laws limiting grass/weed height, etc. While those non-criminals may sometimes show up in court to fight the charge, they typically don’t run or put up much of a fight (physical or otherwise). They pay their fines and get on with working, raising their families, paying their taxes, etc.

Given the quality of our political class, and given how many bureaucrats and government employees see their job as a birthright rather than a solemn responsibility, it should come as no surprise that taxpayers are getting it from both ends, and are seen as prey for both criminals and bureaucrats.

It was in reaction to the post, Drunk Driving Enforcement is A Racket.

The cynic in me says that as long as police officers and municipalities see drinking drivers as cash cows and hide behind the fig leaf of “traffic safety”, arbitrary standards based on BAC will continue even though they may be counterproductive.

What does he mean by counterproductive?

Using 2009 data collected by the University of California at Berkeley, California Watch showed that 1,600 sobriety checkpoints yielded 3,200 DWI arrests. A typical checkpoint would yield only two or three drunk driving arrests. ... When you consider how many hundreds of drivers get stopped at each of those checkpoints, it hardly seems productive to catch a tiny number of drivers that are over the legal limit but may or may not be dangerously impaired, while at the same time seriously impaired drivers go unstopped because so much police manpower is devoted to sobriety checkpoints.

So why have checkpoints if only two people are caught on average?

a single DUI conviction can mean thousands of dollars of revenue for the jurisdiction that issued the citation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. While sobriety checkpoints don’t catch many seriously drunk drivers, they do nab folks for equipment infractions or other sorts of minor crimes and they end up generating a huge amount of revenue for those municipalities and police officers that do use checkpoints. That same California Watch story revealed that those 1,600 police checkpoints may have yielded just 3,200 arrests for DWI, but they resulted in $40 million in fines, plus $30 million in overtime pay for cops and a staggering 24,000 vehicle confiscations.

Bottom Line

Never forget that government exists to serve the people, not exploit them [or eat them].

Is your phone spying on you?

And (I always feel like)
(Somebody's watching me)
And I have no privacy
- lyrics, Rockwell, "Somebody's Watching Me"

The Guardian.Co.UK reports that,

"Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program"

And this is apparently legal. Near of end of the iTunes license (which no one reads), is a paragraph that grants permission for "location-based services."

"Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services."

So far only the iPhone is known to keep a location record on the device itself. However all cell phones leave a history of your travels as you move from one cell tower to another. We trust the cell phone companies to keep that information private and only release it to the police with a court order.

Bottom Line

In the modern world, total privacy is impossible unless you give up credit cards, ATM machines, cell phones, Internet and just about every other modern convenience. Still it is important to know what information about yourself is being collected and how it is being used. This is why I recently advised my father not to use Facebook. It has a history of violating privacy protocols or enabling vendors to violate privacy with your information. Facebook is fun to use but you must be very careful with what you share and expect that anything you post may leak out. For my part I "blur" the data I post by moving my birthday a few days or picking the town next door as my residence. Close enough for friends but incorrect for identity theft.

Speeding Violations

Lane changin' left and right
Blowin' horns and blinkin' lights
Oh the fast lane has never been so slow
- lyrics to “Five O'Clock 500” by Alabama

The USA Today story, Speeding 'cushion' may dwindle due to recession, is worth a read. It describes how some communities are attempting to raise funds by handing out more traffic tickets or raising the cost of traffic violations:

• Police in Canton, Ohio, issued more than four times as many tickets in January of 2010 vs. January 2009. The Police Chief says a decrease in crime in the city has freed officers to do more traffic enforcement and the additional revenue from traffic citations allows his understaffed department to hire more officers.

• Tennessee is considering a law similar Georgia’s that adds a $200 fine for "super speeders," driving more than 25 mph over the posted speed limit.

• Speeding fines are being doubled in "travel-safe" zones on several stretches of highway in Missouri. A state passed a law in 2008 allows authorities to establish "travel-safe" zones on high-crash stretches of highways.

The main theme of the article is the dwindling speeding “cushion” that police used to allow. That is, no fine unless you’re over 10mph above the speed limit. Now some towns are dunning motorists for just 5mph over the limit. And waiting just past the lower speed limit sign to catch them.

Bottom Line

When you see a speed limit sign, the new speed starts at that sign. So begin breaking immediately when you see the speed sign. Police in speed traps immediately after the sign love to catch someone who is slowly breaking or coasting down to the new limit. This is particularly a problem on a main road doing 55 that suddenly switches to 30 as it enters a town. This caught my college roommate in Wyoming on Spring Break.

Another common trap catches motorists on the down side of a steep hill after gravity has increased your speed. I encountered this in rural Illinois many years ago.

Another place I’ve been caught was at a tollbooth requiring 5mph in the “Easy Pass” lane. A policeman with a speed gun stood next to the booth and waved over anyone going faster than 5mph.

Crisis in Times Square

"We are very lucky," NYC Mayor Bloomberg said. "Thanks to alert New Yorkers and professional police officers, we avoided what could [have been] a very deadly event."

Early Saturday evening Times Square was seized with anxiety after a T-shirt vendor, Lance Orton, saw smoke billowing out of a Nissan sport-utility vehicle and alerted a NYPD officer. The Nissan Pathfider was parked with its engine running and hazards flashing near the Lion King theater. Inside was the makeshift bomb cobbled together with three 20-lb propane tanks, two 5-gallon jugs of gasoline and gunpowder from ordinary firecrackers. A small old-fashioned alarm clock was attached to a mysterious long locked metal box with wires coming out. Fortunately the detonator failed.

The heavy metal box was retrieved by a robot that smashed its way into the back window of the SUV, and was taken to a bomb disposal facility. Police inspected every other parked car for a second bomb and kept Times Square closed until 7:30 am Sunday morning. Many people missed Broadway shows or where unable to enter their hotel.

Bottom Line

Lance Orton, reluctant hero of the day, offered this advice to New Yorkers: "You see something, you say something."