20 thoughts on “Spinning our wheels

    1. We flushed Christ only knows how much money down the ART rathole and got bupkis for it.

      Oh, buses are fixin’ to run down the middle of Central beginning Saturday, I’m told. But they are not the disco electric jobbers we were promised. Just the old fossil-fuel stinkboxes.

      We’re not seeing a lot of journalism on that for some reason.

      1. Not much, but not nothing either. We’ve reclaimed some portions of the roadway from cars exclusively for mass transit and with that instill the idea that roads are not just for personal cars. People don’t like it, but in time will come to accept it as just the way it is, and that, in turn, will make it easier to reclaim more roadway. It probably comes at too high a cost, but at least it’s a move in the right direction.

    1. For real. That’s just silly. Visible cops with radar guns don’t slow my crowd down one iota. You could shoot ’em with a real gun and they’d just go faster.

      Dude in a pick-’em-up truck blew past me at about 45 in a 15-mph school zone the other day. And a few weeks back someone stole the wheels off one of our radar-equipped speed-display trailers.

      So, uh, yeah, no.

      1. I had a similar experience in the ‘70’s when a wino, driving the car of another wino, nailed 4 parked cars including mine. He was too drunk to crawl.

  1. We got rid of our red light cameras down here. I don’t have a problem with them if are owned, operated, and maintained by the city or county law enforcement agencies. I do have a problem with them when there are run by a contractor. Plus the cameras took photos of the driver and license plate. Nope, it’s bad enough the BP takes a picture of me every time I go through their check point on HWY 90 on the way North to I-10. Then I get asked if I am a citizen while the drug dog sniffs around the car. You think the BP buys face recognition data from Facebook? Count on it. People have no idea what a compilation of their personal data, including photographs, from multiple sources will reveal to a skilled analyst. They will know every detail of your life. And any data gatherer, like social media or the grocery store, will sell it to anyone who can write a check, domestic or foreign. Do you honestly think Zuck vets all his customers? Cambridge Analytica ring a bell? Plus if you have GPS turned on in your phone settings they can track your every move. You don’t think NSA built that big data center in Utah just to store payroll records. 1984 indeed.

    1. 1984 is obsolete and all sorts of people, the NSA being only one, have capabilities that we once dreaded thinking about. But traffic cameras are the least of it. Shit, I worry less about what the USG knows about me, given they have my permission to shine a flashlight up my asshole in return for my feddle gubbmint paycheck, than what China stole and what others buy and sell. Its awful.

      I agree with Pat that if we have cameras, they should be owned and operated by the jurisdiction, not some privatized bunch of assholes. We see the problems with private red light cameras, private prisons, private armies (Blackwater) and the list gets longer.

      Now, dammit, I have to readjust that flashlight as it is interfering with my sitting posture.

      1. My oldest is 9, so whatever technology they had in 2010 is probably obsolete. But exactly one week after buying a box of diapers and a can of formula, we were getting Gerber life insurance ads in the mail. Take your darkest NSA/CIA fears, multiply them by a thousand, and that’s what Amazon and Facebook are up to.

    2. You nailed the prob. They work just fine in Europe. Cuz they’re usually city-owned.

      We got them here on our busy streets, but they’re never turned on. When they do catch someone running a red, there’s usually someone else making an illegal left who’s obscuring they first guy’s plate.

    3. One more consideration: it’s never made sense to take a $75k/year cop in a $50k land yacht with $12k in computer gear, and have him writing $100 speeding tickets. Put up the cameras, demilitarize the cops, put them on bikes or LPCs, and get them mingling in the community. How many uses of deadly force started with busted taillights?

  2. Whatcha whining about? In Montana were are no 47. buncha red neck hicks I guess. Low wages, crappy roads and republican legislators controlling both both houses.. ….

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