Citizen uses OpenCV to track speeders near his home

There are various things that play against safety in residential roads marked for 25 MPH speeds.

In the winter, they're rarely cleared of snow and ice, making them a hazard to travel even at the speed limit. Cars are parked on both sides of the roads much like a typical city street, reducing visibility of pedestrians as they emerge from between cars unexpectedly. And then there's the children playing in the yard who are preoccupied with their activity and not always paying attention to their own safety.

My daughter is hard of hearing (she requires hearing aids to hear and even with them she doesn't have normal hearing) and very ADD. We've continually lectured her about "not running into the street" without making absolutely certain there are no cars, but on one occasion she was nearly hit chasing a ball despite my wife and I being out front screaming and running after her as she bolted into the road. The ball was destroyed by a speeding car who almost also hit the neighbors mailbox when he swerved to avoid killing her. He missed, thank God, but even afterward continued at his breakneck speed down the rest of the street. Since that incident, we rarely allow her to play in the front yard and never allow it between 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM due to the rush hour traffic using my subdivision as a bypass for a poorly timed intersection's traffic light.

Filming and publishing license plate numbers can get you in trouble in some places and I'm sure there are other rules I'm unaware of related to what you are allowed to publish publicly, but what he's doing is likely very legal and protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.

Most of the time people receiving the 1-5 MPH tickets are receiving them for violating the speed well beyond that amount (with the actual clocked speed written on the ticket). This encourages people to just pay the ticket without fighting it since they've been given a much lower civil infraction and it makes it a lot harder to succeed in court since the judge knows "radar calibration/accuracy" is much less likely with the written, clocked speed.

A 25 mph speed limit on a street with a bus route is applying a band-aid in most situations. You're never going to get 100% compliance with traffic law, so if a safe pedestrian corridor depends on that, you lose. (By the way, "stepped up" enforcement lasts until the local neighborhood association folks get a ticket for rolling through a stop sign.)

I had a similar issue in my neighborhood a mother and child were hit by a driver making a turn in a corridor with a lot of near misses. Instead of going on some punitive goose chase of enforcing an unrealistic speed limit, we (members of a neighborhood association) approached it as what it was -- a traffic engineering problem.

In our case, traffic light timings weren't adjusted appropriately, so drivers felt compelled to "race" in order to catch a light. Lane markings were unclear, so it wasn't obvious where drivers should be if they were turning. Crosswalks tape was pulled up, and it wasn't obvious to a driver turning where the pedestrians crossed. Also, the pedestrian signal buttons were broken.

We lobbied the city council people and mayor pretty heavily, and they made a few modest investments in signals, signage, paint and a traffic study. 5 years later, accidents dropped by 40% in that corridor.