A German court last month overturned a traffic citation after prosecutors failed to prove the accuracy of a new laser-based speed camera technology. The district court of Dillenburg heard testimony from four experts, each of whom cast doubt on the system. The Judge Matthias Gampe concluded that the motorist accused by a Poliscan automated ticketing machine of driving 96km/h (60 MPH) in a 40 (25 MPH) zone was not guilty.

Manufactured by Vitronic in Germany, the Poliscan system is mounted in tall roadside poles or in a more compact mobile version. It uses lidar to estimate a vehicle’s speed across multiple lanes over a distance of 130 feet. Vitronic boasts that the ability to simultaneously track multiple, individual cars on a multilane highway gives its product a competitive advantage over conventional products that use radar or in-pavement sensors to estimate speed.

About 100 of the devices were installed in Mannheim in 2007. Since then, 19,000 motorists have complained about erroneous readings. The expert witnesses testified that changing lanes or having a vehicle cross between your car and the camera could generate spurious readings. As the court found, there is no external means of verifying that the speed estimate generated is accurate because the system does not photograph vehicles at set distances like conventional systems.

Vitronic counters the criticism by admitting the theoretical accuracy problem is irrelevant when compared to the hundreds of thousands of tickets that have been “confirmed with approvals of competent state authorities.” Nestor Traffic Systems had exclusive rights to distribute the Poliscan system in the US before going bankrupt. American Traffic Solutions acquired Nestor earlier this year.

Are you ^&%$ign serious? The manufacturer states that the accuracy problem is irrelevant? So as long as “hundreds of thousands of tickets are confirmed by state authorities”, then it doesn’t matter about the 19,000 innocent motorists that were booked, fined, lost demerit points and in some cases their driver’s licenses & livelihood?

How much does this (once again) smack of corporate profits over people’s rights and innocence?

No wonder some people run these cameras over…it is disgusting to hear comments like that come from the manufacturer.

Alan Jones talks to Lord Monckton, British climate change sceptic, who says the Copenhagen treaty is about creating a dictatorship world government

Fact or Myth: Is your  vehicle capable of avoiding all collisions?

There are car companies now setting cars with an extraordinary rate and with advanced motor safety devices. These are the world’s first uncrashable cars.
Can you imagine sitting behind the wheel  as you cruise down the road a bank of sensors and computers  monitoring you?

Well, if you happen to get distracted by a phone call while driving, tailgate the vehicle ahead, put on lipstick or try to speed excessively, the computer in these new set up cars will note your errant behavior and prevent you from meeting a road accident. If a deadly weapon like a gun for example will be pointed against you, likewise, the car will take evasive action.

You may also take your hands off the wheel while driving along the highway and your car will take over,  thereby reducing your tension caused by high speed rate.
Yes, it would really sound amazing but things have changed so much  with the help of technology. Thanks to this new inventions.. there are cars now with strong sensors especially when their about to lose control.  Some of these advanced vehicles  even have the ability to help the drivers apply brakes to keep themselves in a safe distance from the car in front. In other words, they are the ones manipulating the car. And if for instance the driver is a little drowsy, they’ll try to wake him up .

To cite some of the popular brands, Volkswagen is one that has a lane-departure warning system that will steer its cars back into their lanes if they begin to wander. Meanwhile, the Volvo XC60 can sense an imminent low-speed rear-end accident and bring itself to a stop before disaster strikes.
In the next few years, we could just imagine the next inventions to come… It’s incredible to see the cars who could be talking to us like what we see in some movies.  As if the cars have feelings and  would have the ability to make decisions until we reach our destinations.

In addition, Volvo, the company that brought the world the three-point safety belt, is one of several companies which took a lead in presenting cars that are nearly impossible to crash. It has gone further than most by declaring the ambitious goal that: “by 2020, no one should be killed or injured in a Volvo”.  Not only this… the  manufacturers  are thinking of inventing cars that would also provide safety to the pedestrians as well. As if the cars would know at a distance if pedestrians are most likely going to be injured.

Volvo’s S60,  which is due out next year, will introduce a radar and camera-based system that  detects when a pedestrian steps in front of the car and applies full braking power. The company says the car would reduce the collision force by about 75% to prevent the risk of serious injury to a pedestrian. So, do you think this is possible to happen?

On the other hand, Toyota’s product planning manager, Peter Evans, is cautious about predicting dramatic reductions in the road toll in the next decade.
According to him, the difficulty is on controlling the human and environmental elements in the road safety equation. One can invent an intelligent car but developing intelligent roads and drivers is more of a challenge.

This  is true for majority of road accidents happen not because of the kind of car but because of undisciplined drivers. Evans  further says technology needs to be combined with education of drivers. In fact “It’s that old saying about the nut behind the wheel being the most unreliable part of the car,” he says.
Some say, a solution to this may be in strategies similar to those being considered by the NSW Government. It is investigating whether the human variable can be tackled with a Wollongong-based trial of technology it calls intelligent speed adaptation.

There is  a study made in line with this.  As a trial, which began in June last year and will run until December, the study involves monitoring the driving practices of 100 volunteers to see whether they are less prone to speeding when the system is operating in their car.

Similarly the BMW 7-Series overseas and engineers from the company have carried out tests in Australia, covering about 5000 kilometers of city and rural roads. In contrast, this system has a speed-limit data saved in its navigation system and has a back up because there’s an on-board camera that monitors all roadside signs thus  this makes sure that the driver knows everything including roadwork sites. But the BMW system provides information only and doesn’t help slowing down the car which means that everything is still the driver’s responsibility.

Of course in other countries there are car companies  which are trying to solve the same kind of problem. In Japan, car companies including Toyota and Nissan are working with the Government to develop intelligent freeways. Toyota is about to introduce a kind of technology that will feed real-time traffic information from roadside sensors into a car’s cabin.

It will alert drivers and let them know if there is an accident, breakdown or slow-moving traffic around a corner or over a crest. The technology has the potential to stop minor collisions.

But if this is going to be used in Australia, there might be a problem. As compared to Japan, Australia is larger but less populated. The features may not be the same and therefore  could have an impact on the road toll. Furthermore, Australia, doesn’t have clear line markers on all roads which further require more alert drivers. And to add to all these would be the long distances of roads that you find which may be very tiring for drivers.

Now, could you resist thinking about the uncrashable cars?

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Payne ended up in the hospital, but his shooting last week brought to a boil simmering tensions between residents of this tiny former cotton city and their police force. Drivers quickly learn to slow to a crawl along the gravel roads and the two-lane highway that run through Jericho, but they say sometimes that isn’t enough to fend off the city ticketing machine.

“You can’t even get them to answer a call because normally they’re writing tickets,” said Thomas Martin, chief investigator for the Crittenden County Sheriff’s Department. “They’re not providing a service to the citizens.”

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

Sheriff’s deputies patrolled Jericho until the 1990s, when the city received grant money to start its own police force, Martin said.

Police often camped out in the department’s two cruisers along the highway that runs through town, waiting for drivers who failed to slow down when they reached the 45 mph zone ringing Jericho. Residents say the ticketing got out of hand.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

The frequent ticketing apparently led to the vandalization of the cruisers, and the department took to parking the cars overnight at the sheriff’s department eight miles away.

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

Doctors in Memphis, Tenn., removed a .40-caliber bullet from Payne’s hip bone, Martin said. Another officer suffered a grazing wound to his finger from the bullet.

Martin declined to name the officer who shot Payne. It’s unclear if the officer has been disciplined.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

Payne remains in good condition at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis. He referred questions to his lawyer.

“I know that he was unarmed and I know he was shot,” Fishman said. “None of that sounds too good for the city to me.”

After the shooting, Martin said police chief Willie Frazier told the sheriff’s department he was disbanding the police force “until things calm down.” The sheriff’s department has been patrolling the town in the meantime.

A call to a city hall number listed as Frazier’s went to a fax machine. Frazier did not respond to a written request for comment sent to his office.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

Mayor Helen Adams declined to speak about the shooting when approached outside her home, saying she had just returned from a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t talk.

“We’ll get with you after all this comes through,” Adams said Tuesday before shutting the door.

A white Ford Crown Victoria sat in her driveway with “public property” license plates. A sales brochure advertising police equipment sat in the back seat of the car.