08-10-2016, 05:24 PM
(08-10-2016, 05:02 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(08-10-2016, 04:39 PM)highlander Wrote: If every police force in Ontario equips police officers with the Ottawa style range measurement device, that seems like a pretty good equivalent to speed traps - special initiatives to catch people breaking the law in places that it is problematic. So enforcement of both laws is probably equivalent for these cases.
(...) There is no way for a police officer driving a car to measure the passing distance of another car to a cyclist. This would be the equivalent of radar/lidar in police vehicles. Perhaps video would verify after the fact, but I would imagine the police officer would still have to make the judgment call at the time. So how close does the police officer have to be for their estimation of the passing distance to be reliable?
Basically, the police officer needs to be on the bicycle in order to measure the distance; this is not a method for remote measurement. So I don't know that this method would scale up well for large-scale enforcement, more likely it could be used for temporary local campaigns.
We have officers riding around town every day on bicycles. While it's less likely that driver's would pass a police officer too closely, I'm sure it does happen. These officers could write tickets for this offense.
That being said, I disagree that the officer must be on the bike. If an officer is following a vehicle that overtakes a bicycle, the officer should be in an acceptable position to know if it is too close. Obviously, it would have to be *way* too close, i.e., there is some margin of error, but it isn't unreasonable to expect officers to make this judgement.
Officers make other judgements, how close is too close to qualify as tailgating for example.