Dobleve

Normally I think of “open source” as being just a software thing; for example our website is run with all open source software. I was reminded last week it really can be anything.

A few weeks ago I received 2 speeding tickets in the mail, one each on the way to and from Madrid. I was caught by photo radar so I had no knowledge of the tickets until I got the notices in the mail. The way you pay speeding tickets in Spain is to go to the bank, so I went to my bank and talked to my friend Jorge.

I like Jorge for many reasons, one of which was how he handled me trying to pay my speeding tickets. He noticed on the ticket that our car is not in my name, it is in the name of my employer who leases it for us. His first question was why I would pay the ticket if the police didn’t have my name. I assured him that my employer did have my name and knew which car I had so they would find me eventually. Do you have a radar detector? No. Ok, that’s good because they are illegal in Spain. How about a GPS? Yes. Ok, here’s what you do. Google “radares fijos” and get the location of all of the photo radars in Spain and then your GPS can tell you when to slow down.

I followed Jorge’s advice and quickly found a list of all of the radar cameras in Spain and loaded it into our GPS, which now tells us when to slow down every time. The list of camera locations is not provided by the state, but rather an open source project in Spain – when you get a ticket or see a new tower being put in, you simply add it to the list. You can download the current locations here. An excellent open source project in my mind!

I did some quick searching to see if a similar project exists in the US and I wasn’t able to find one, although I did find some companies that sell similar data and/or combined radar detector and GPS units.