| wstar |
07-14-2009 12:07 PM |
Well, "unmarked" is relative. Usually I'm pretty good at picking those out, there's usually some tell-tale signs, but sometimes they aren't obvious until you get close.
I've gotten 3 radar tickets with my V1 in the car (and avoided many, many others). Two times it was because I had turned off the V1 while working on the car in the garage, and forgot to turn it back on (it's hardwired, and I usually just assume it's on - one was very recently, my only 370Z ticket). The other time was a really smart well-prepared cop with some flavor of instant-on Ka radar. He positioned himself about 1/2 mile past a hill that you can't see over on the highway, and he was waiting and not using the gun until he actually saw an obvious speeder crest the hill. So there was no early warning, but I saw him on the side of the road a split second before he lit up the radar (and sent my V1 going going berserk) and luckily I managed to bleed off a lot of speed before he got a lock. It was still a pretty heavy ticket, but it could've been much worse if I hadn't spotted him and started reacting before he pulled the trigger.
Nothing is fool-proof, but a V1 has definitely cut down on my rate of tickets in the long term. I've been seeing more and more radar/laser enforcement around Houston the past year or so. I'm guessing this is economically motivated by the city's budget in this economy, so I kinda treat it like a semi-randomly-enforced road tax, and my V1 is my tax professional that helps avoid me getting screwed too bad. It especially feels that way when you see them randomly pulling cars out of 80mph traffic (in a 70) repeatedly, when nobody's really being unsafe at all. It's like shooting harmless fish in a barrel.
Of course it would be more ideal if traffic enforcement would focus on actually targetting the rarer truly unsafe drivers regardless of speed, and let speeders off if they're not doing anything that's clearly unsafe. From a god's-eye rational view, it's pretty clear to me that me (being an experienced and attentive driver) in my car (which is exceptionally-well maintained by me personally and designed for this kinda stuff) doing 90-110-ish in little to no traffic is far safer than someone who doesn't really know how to drive to begin with, isn't paying attention to conditions and other drivers, with brakes that haven't been serviced in 3 years, going the speed limit in the fast lane while trying to gulp down a starbucks and jabbering with someone on their cellphone. But unfortunately officers don't have a god's-eye view of every situation, so I guess they do what they can, mostly. I just wish more of them would at least try to be rational about it, instead of being ticket-vending-machines.
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