Roger The Radar Rotter

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roger the Radar Rotter generally lurks around the Sharjah University City area. His favourite places are the roads around the AUS campus, the back road that tracks along the landfill from the logistics center to the roundabout by Sharjah English School and the Middle Road from the Mileiha Road up to the 311. Oh! And also on the stretch of Middle Road just beyond the 311 turnoff towards Sharjah City.

He's more Wile E. Coyote than most. He likes to hide his little portable radar behind a lamp post and then drive a few hundred yards up the road and lurk, no doubt giggling softly to himself and drooling, waiting for the flashes to go off.

Knowing full well that we skittish victims can sniff he's around when he parks up, he often hides the car. This means the wary are rewarded with glimpses of cars parked in odd places as more trusting souls trigger the cheery 'pop' of the radar followed by the inevitable 'cherching' of the Sharjah Police cash register.

It's an expensive game these days: they've just put the fines up. So why speed at all? You ask, in all sensibility.

Well, the reason Roger has quite so much fun with his sneaky tricks is he likes to pick roads that have insane 60kph limits on them. The roads around the University are, for instance, long and straight and have two lanes. They are nowhere near any crossings or habitation, just long tarmac stretches running along outside the high campus walls. The UAE, very sensibly IMHO, has a 'grace limit' of 20kph above the actual speed limit, so you can travel a maximum 80kph on these roads. Nudge it just 1 kilo above it when Roger's around and POW you're toast, bub.

The wee back road behind Sharjah English is a long straight line of blacktop running along a fence and surrounded by scrubland. The low speed limits make the drive interminably frustrating and the old speedometer does rather tend to sneak up a little. And then you spot, out of the corner of your eye, a glint of something out of place. Slow down, pass by regally and breathe a little sigh of relief as Roger sits in his hidden car, shaking his fists and snarling, 'Damn you McNabb!'

The other day I was driving thusly, overtaking a very slow lorry on the road behind SES. I had spotted Roger's car on the hard shoulder ahead and was taking things easy, when I get some spotty Herbert in an FJ giving it socks on the flashers and horn behind me. With a resigned sigh I pulled in beyond the front of the lorry and moderated my speed.

With satanic glee, I watched my tormentor speed past me, honouring me with a great display of shade thrown sideways as he hit the throttle to let me know one of us was a real man with a real right foot and the other a sissy rated by all and sundry as less than zero.

Boom!

Tisshhhh...

I felt a little like Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock's anti-hero whose sword feasts on souls and passes a little of the energy to its tragic albino* wielder.

For I had given Roger the soul he craved but the benefit, my precioussss, was mine, all mine...

*Apparently these days we're supposed to say 'person of albinism' but frankly, my dear...

This Post Is Not About Books

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The relief out there must be palpable.

Driving along the other day in Sharjah, doing bang on 99kph in an 80kph area. The guy in front of me's doing the same. We come up to a forward-facing radar (ie: it's facing away from us as we approach it.). These are a good thing, sportsmanlike and all that. You can see 'em, the game's fair, like. Not quite as sportsmanlike as the UK's stripy 'I'M A RADAR' decoration, but one takes what one can get.

Digression. What's not sportsmanlike is the Wile E. Coyote type who's taken to infesting the 'Middle Road' outside the new Islamic institutions that have been built on the brown field land that was Formerly The Sharjah Landfill. He's got a wee super-slim portable radar and he likes to slide it in behind sprinklers, discarded plastic barriers or road signs, then sit in his plain 4WD on the slip road and cackle insanely to himself as he waits to trap unwary motorists like a particularly obnoxious spider. Bad form, that man.

Anyway back to our 99kph drive. Guy in front comes abreast of radar and moves across into the slow lane and BLAM he's flashed. I drive past the radar at the same speed, and I'm good. I got to thinking about that as I've been flashed before doing under the limit but changing lanes. And I think I might be on to a bit of relativity in action here.

If you move away from the radar by changing lanes, you're compounding your speed relative to the radar by the speed of your lateral movement. That plus the speed of your forward movement means that although you are moving forwards at under the speed limit, you are moving away from the radar at beyond the speed limit. You'd have to be relatively unlucky, because the beam is reasonably tight for a radar working in what they call 'across the road' configuration. But travelling along that beam as well as across it means that, for the 0.2 seconds or so that the radar is sampling your speed, you're adding a couple of metres of travel at least. Even a metre of travel is equivalent to five metres per second, or 300 metres per minute. Or 18,000 metres per hour - 18 kph.

So by changing lanes in front of that radar, it's likely my buddy was actually doing something like 110 kph relative to the radar.

Einstein would have been proud of me, I'm sure...

You can, SHOULD actually, pre-order Irish thriller A Decent Bomber here. Hurry, there's only 24 hours or so left. And stop complaining, the whole damn post was about radars, this is just, oh, a message from our sponsor...

Sharjah - Radar Down

(Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

As eagle eyed observers will recall from earlier posts, Sharjah has been suffering from a mysterious and expensive spate of radar shootings.

Someone has been regularly taking out the traffic radars on the Mileiha Road - the arterial route that leads from the notorious National Paints parkabout all the way out to the delightful East Coast littoral of Khor Kalba across on the other side of the Hajjar Mountains. It's a delightful drive, BTW - and you can pop across the border to Fujeirah for a bite to eat for lunch before coming back, say, over the Masafi/Dhaid road.

This morning's drive to work took me along the road from Sharjah Airport to junction 2 on the aforementioned Road To Mileiha. That connecting road contains, among many other things (including a co-op and loads of huge palatial villas) two radars.

Standing by the second one was a copper and a couple of puzzled looking blokes. The radar on the northern carriageway (one of the expensive new models) had been pretty comprehensively smashed. If that was a bullet, it presumably means the perp's still at it. Now all we've got to wait for is Gulf News rehashing that quote they use every time they report on a new radar 'kill':

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

It's no laughing matter for Sharjah's finest, by the way - that's now a total of 15 radars ruined and, at Dhs250,000 apiece, we're talking about almost four million Dirhams. To give it a sense of perspective, that's almost four days' revenue from the RTA's Sharjah-bound Salik gates!!!

When they catch him, the radar shootist is undoubtedly in for the high jump in no small way!