Giant Banana Pulled Over: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s of Times

Post by qingcharles » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #119

qingcharles wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a car that was pulled over dozens of times so the cops could take pics with it. Most of the time it was cool. Two times pissed me off: one time a cop had just pulled me over on the highway for a pic, okay cool, I pull back onto the highway and went maybe a mile before I was pulled over a second time by his buddy. Other time I was just rolling into LA for a comic con, it was 3am and I'd been driving for about 14…

I can neither confirm nor deny any first-hand experience with connecting the two sides of the tracks with jumper cables in order to trigger the signal.

Post by willf » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

Post by wat10000 » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 11:29 AM UTC

lazide wrote: post #116

wat10000 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial. Playing the bagpipes while riding a unicycle. Very weird and unusual but not reasonable suspicion of anything. I'm happy to come up with a dozen more if you lack imagination. Similarly, there's plenty of non-weird, non-unusual behavior that legally justifies a traffic stop, such as exceeding the speed limit or rolling through a stop sign.

Have you ever tried it in public, except in perhaps a college town or another handful of special places or circumstances? Because you’d definitely get threatened with disturbing the peace, entertaining without a license, or be evaluated for public intoxication or drug use anywhere else. People generally get speeding or traffic tickets when they stick out. You have this weird overconfident naïveté about how the world…

Post by shmeeed » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #103

fragmede wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an awesome story! deserves to be more than a hacker news comment with imgur links

Here's where the barriers came down and we panicked a little bit as we couldn't figure out how to get them back up :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo1DvKzRJ4 The city actually gave us permission for this and promised us there "probably" wasn't any trains using the track that day. This was actually the first time we'd ever tried to fit the train wheels, we didn't realise they wouldn't fit over the brakes, so we ha…

Post by qingcharles » Wed, Jun 24, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #128

qingcharles wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We assumed it was some sort of electrical connection between the two through the wheels of the car. Is that how the trains activate it?

That's how it worked 30 years ago at least. There have been upgrades to the signaling system since then, but detecting a circuit being closed is so simple and reliable that it would be odd to do away with it.