Happy Birthday, Chris! I took this picture of him when I was out in Monterey last month. We were walking along the ridge road in the morning. It was kind of foggy and there was a little bit drizzle too, but it didn’t seem to dampen Chris’ spirits as this photo shows.
On Tuesday, the weather was gorgeous. Anne biked to work and back and got four miles. I biked in the Park after work and got fifteen miles. I saw the first egret of the year, a Great White Egret. It is pictured below. I promise to try not to go quite as crazy about egrets as I did last year. At least that is my intention, but you know what they say about good intentions.
To follow-up on yesterday’s post, I saw Charlack’s traffic camera on my way home from work. I was headed south bound it was trained on the north bound lanes, so if it ever catches me, it would have to be in the morning. It looked to me to be a rather temporary affair. The camera was mounted atop a trailer and was situated just outside the highways perimeter fence. I’m guessing that MODOT would not allow the camera on the highway’s shoulder. I’ll have to study it more closely, to get a better sense of how it is supposed to work.
The paper had a front page article on this subject. Charlack will fine speeders $100. According to the company that will operate the camera for Charlack, in a one hour test period a hundred cars were seen going 75 in a 60 MPH zone.
Ticketing a hundred cars per hour is way more tickets than the old cop in the loop approach was ever able to do. Currently 29% of Charlack’s entire city budget comes from traffic violations. I’m thinking that Charlack’s mayor is going to get a big raise. 😉
I-170 is about twenty miles long and Charlack has jurisdiction over only a quarter-mile of it. If their plan goes forward and I’m not the only one squawking about it, it would only prevent speeding on about 1% of I-170. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all in favor of traffic law enforcement, but I think that what Charlack is planing goes from petty theft to grand larceny. I might remind the reader that the last and possibly only time I got a speeding ticket, it was issued from Charlack. That was twenty-five years ago and they are still running the same scam today.
First, the mayor of Charlack can’t get his raise if the company running that traffic camera is getting a big enough percentage of the revenues raised from the ensnared speeders! I *do* wonder what that contractor is getting, now that I’ve started thinking about it…
This sounds like it’s simply a different “spin” on the old Speed Traps!! Pretty soon, folks will have that 0.25 mile stretch pretty well figured out, and the speeds will be artificially “in control” for that stretch. Although, I do see many accidents leading into that 0.25 mile stretch as the wary folks slow down and the folks on “auto pilot” plow into their rears. In that case, all the accident citation revenues will be for the communities surrounding Charlack – and Charlack will lose out!
You seem to have managed to group all birthdays into one short package! How did you accomplish that feat?