Dominican Police to use New Speedguns
LOCAL TRAFFIC POLICE are to start utilising new speed gun technology in order to reduce road congestion.
Our reporter was able to gain exclusive footage of the police using the new devices in a pilot test just outside Puerto Plata.
Clearly, most of the motorised traffic currently around has carefully designed tyres made from various rubber compounds. As we understand it, rubber is a soft material, and unlikely to have any effect on the hard tarmac that makes up the road surface. On the other hard, donkeys’ hooves are extremely hard, and some donkeys have been seen to be scraping their hooves in a deliberate attempt to gouge into the road surface.
The Ministry of Transport have come up with a plan to get donkeys off the roads, and into the fields where they belong. The new speed guns will actually be used to identify culprits who are travelling too slowly for the road conditions. As donkeys rarely travel above 30 mph, they should be easy to identify with the Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) guns.
The new technology has been imported from the UK, where speed guns have been used to annoy motorists effectively for years, although they had to undergo several modifications in order to work correctly here.
Instead of measuring the vehicle’s speed by testing how long it takes the gun’s signal to return, the modified devices send out several small bursts of infra red light at short intervals to measure the distance between the donkey’s ears. As the rider will usually have quite different ears to the donkey, the measurement can be quite precise.
The information is then compared with how fast the donkey thinks it should be going in relation to how fast a ‘moto’ driver laden up with an adult passenger, 2 children and a fridge-freezer would normally be expected to travel, according to Feynmann’s ‘Integral all over paths’ law on quantum mechanics.
Unlike the typical speed gun, the algorithm processing is not done in the gun itself, but instead, the data is sent back to HQ where culprits are identified, photos compared with the MOT’s database of known offenders and tickets later issued.
It is hoped that the police will be able to successfully deter donkey owners from recklessly endangering other road users with their outdated and unsuitable mode of transport. This should encourage the uptake amongst the younger generation of the new efficient, quiet and emissionless ‘motos’ which have started to appear on the roads.
Police have also been issued with canisters of ‘pepper spray’, although it’s not confirmed whether these were for use on the donkeys or their riders.
Story by Gringo Mack B. Leave