Radar Zone

by David Gluzman

Feed them to the pigs! Um.. I could only imagine someone at the police force ever saying this before a photo radar gig. Heh. But in the past couple of months in Calgary, I’ve been wondering what in the world the city is up to.

Photo-radar. Unless you’ve never been on a road in a car before, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Theses stealthy bastards camp out in undercover cop cars tagging speedsters while having a nap or chewing on a donut. God I hate photo radar.

I think that radar is actually very dangerous to have active in the city. People become completely useless if they spot a radar van, and become a sever danger to other drivers around. For example, you could be driving around when all of a sudden the driver in front of you (who was going the speed limit), decides to slam the brakes and go 40km/h under the speed limit. *FLASH* someone else gets hit by the radar, or someone causes and accident. Wait a minute, I think auto body shops are into this scam.

Now normally I can live with the photo radar traps, but this past month I’ve seen some crazy action by the cops:

Hiding behind trees at 11pm: I saw driving down Memorial late one night when I saw this strobe light of a flash on the car in front of me. Son of a $#@$ they had a tripod setup behind a tree!

Brand new pickup truck with the hazard lights on: Deerfoot trail. For those not familiar with this tiny freeway, it’s a gong show to drive on. 3 to 4 lanes wide and complete idiots driving either too slow or too fast. Lets mix it up a bit and place a truck on the side of the road in distress (which you see ALL the time on the Deerfoot). *FLASH* %@#$% not me thankfully, but you should have seen the brake lights lightup in front of me. I had to literally swerve into another lane without looking to avoid a pileup.

Construction vehicle: This one takes the cake. I was driving on Elbow Dr. when I saw a continuous strobe being hit into incoming traffic. Not until I got closer I saw it was a City of Calgary road crew hitting up people for speeding. The kicker on this one was that they had the big yellow arrow (on the back of the truck) flashing and thus telling commuters that construction was in that lane. So if you were caught speeding in this fictitious construction zone you where charged twice the fine. What the…

Freaking red-necks, why can’t we be more like BC. I say screw photo radar, I hate having to expend a very large part of my driving concentration looking out for speed traps, rather than focusing on avoiding bad drivers.

  • Radar Zone
  • by David Gluzman
  • Published on January 1st, 2002

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