DIY - Speed Trap

Many people complain about the speed of traffic in their neighbourhoods. Is it an accurate complaint? How do you justify your complaint to the authorities? Well, there's an app for that too.

I remember hearing about a person who was tired of this so he measured the distance between two utility poles beside the highway that he could see from his kitchen window. He would site and time vehicles between the poles with a stopwatch.

Time over distance equals speed, so he had a fairly accurate measure of what was going on.

As is usual today, there's an app for that. A quick search for speed gun apps turns up a short list of easy to use apps that may be used for a Do It Yourself speed trap.

With a little bit of effort and the app, you can give a good account of what is actually happening on the street in front of your home or anywhere else that interests you.

An alternative to this is a Raspberry Pi based device called Telraam that is designed to do traffic monitoring. Billed as a way to identify rat-run traffic, vehicle related pollution and speeding, the web based interpretation of the data produced can be used to make traffic management plans better.

The device is available from Gotron in Belgium for € 110.