My friend is in Highway Patrol. He absolutely hates these lanes because they are impossible to enforce for this very reason. There are a ton of rules and exemptions and he has to try and verify that the number on the sign matches the number of people in the car in a split second.
He basically admitted to me that it's based on the honor system, he has no real way to enforce that the number is correct unless it's a convertible with the top down.
> Southern California has it too, but they call it "the" 101
I moved here 26 years ago but I still call it "the 101" (but I call all the other freeways by just their number, except the 5 because we have that in SoCal too). So yeah, I guess you can use it to detect I learned to drive in LA, but I've lived more than 1/2 my life here, so if I'm an invader, I'm definitely playing the long con!
And then if your friend makes that call, he has to conduct a traffic stop. On the freeway!
So in the interest of penalizing someone who committed no safety infraction, only a financial one, we create a dangerous situation for everyone on the freeway, including the officer.
> In 1998, California Highway Patrol officer Scott Greenly was struck by a car and killed while issuing a ticket on the shoulder of Route 85; thereafter the portion between Quito Road and Prospect Road in the City of Saratoga was named the CHP Officer Scott M. Greenly Memorial Freeway.
Regarding "the 101", I always wondered why it's "101" here and "the 101" in SoCal. According to an article I read, it's because the original Los Angeles area freeways didn't have numbers, just names: the Pasadena Freeway, the Ventura Freeway, etc. It only made sense to use "the". When they got numbers later, the habit of using "the" stuck around.
In the Bay Area, the freeways got numbers first. They do have names too (like the stretch of 85 mentioned above), but mostly no one uses their names or even know them. So there never was a habit of using "the" with the number.
I was always told by people outside of LA that the reason was because in LA the freeways are so important they're revered like religious idols so they get the definite article. But my parents grew up through the transition you describe and back up what you said, that they all had names before numbers.
I was a kid in the early 80s and back then all the traffic reports on the radio were still by freeway name, so I learned them all that way too.
The FastTrak lanes operated by Los Angeles Metro (the 10 and 110) are testing facial recognition cameras that can supposedly do the same job and ticket people automatically. I'm a little skeptical (on top of the privacy implications, there's practical ones: how well will they work when your passenger is reclining in the last row of a van with tinted windows? Or a child in a car seat facing backwards?), but we'll see how the pilot goes over the coming months.
I am not a lawyer of any kind and this is not legal advice. I'm merely speculating based on my past experience with other tickets on how I might handle the hypothetical scenario being discussed.
It's up to the state to prove their case. I'd contest any such ticket with the truth. Likely these systems are profitable because people don't generally contest the ticket (or do so in ineffectual ways). Neither the private company nor the state wants any judge making a ruling that makes such tickets impossible to enforce. I'd expect it would get dropped before I'd ever have to talk to a judge, but even if not, unless they have clear evidence I am lying, they're probably going to lose in court.
I am 99.99% sure right before covid I read (and saw them installing something) they were using some kind of heat or thermal reading on the 110. Me being curious I always set my transponder to 2 and turned on my passenger seat warmer on after that. Never got anything in the mail.
Is "being curious" a tongue-in-cheek way to describe breaking the law? "I was just curious whether anyone would notice if I step out of the store without paying"
Yeah they won't be able to see my baby facing backwards in the carseat or my mother in law in the back row of the van. That will really only work for cars with one row of seats.
He basically admitted to me that it's based on the honor system, he has no real way to enforce that the number is correct unless it's a convertible with the top down.
> Southern California has it too, but they call it "the" 101
I moved here 26 years ago but I still call it "the 101" (but I call all the other freeways by just their number, except the 5 because we have that in SoCal too). So yeah, I guess you can use it to detect I learned to drive in LA, but I've lived more than 1/2 my life here, so if I'm an invader, I'm definitely playing the long con!