“Are speed traps real?.. Are there certain areas where police will set up… where it’s easy to catch speeders at the bottom of a hill or at a zone where the speed limit changes suddenly?”
“That does happen. We have to remember that speed limits change suddenly not because it makes it easier for police to do enforcement, but usually because the road features are changing… Police can catch you for speeding in all sorts of ways. They can pace your vehicle by following behind you, they can use moving radar in the police vehicle which can measure the speed of vehicles ahead of them or in the opposite lane of travel. They can also do a visual estimation – they don’t need a measurement of your speed on some sort of device. Many police officers are trained on how to estimate your vehicle’s speed within a margin of error of less than 10 km/h and provide accurate evidence in court about how fast you were going.”
Many years ago I was in a hurry to get my kids to school one morning. We were a bit late so I was frantically trying to rush them to school. As I was pulling Up to the school front to park a police jumped out from behind a parked car. He pulled me over and made me and my kids sit there for quite a while. Once he returned to my car he handed me a speeding ticket. I asked him if he had a radar gun and he responded by telling me that he was trained to establish the speed of a car by eye. I thought that was a bunch of rubbish. So I filed for a dispute. At the court hearing he cancelled my ticket.