The San Marino Police Department has a new officer, of sorts, whose job is telling you when you’re driving too fast on the city’s picturesque roadways.
That “officer” is called a speed awareness monitor, and you’ll start seeing it towering over passing vehicles along, say, Sierra Madre Boulevard or Huntington Drive, where it will let motorists know if they should ease off the accelerator a bit while it also works on compiling traffic data for the city. Attached to a trailer, it can easily be towed around town as needed.
“We can’t be everywhere at once,” explained SMPD Sgt. Tim Tebbetts, “and hopefully this will alert a driver who is innocently not paying attention.”
This new piece of equipment replaces a similar trailer that was around 25 years old, Tebbetts said. That older device was shorter, meaning traffic often blocked it from being viewed by drivers farther away from it, and its older battery system meant that it needed to be charged every day.
By contrast, the newer device, manufactured by Stalker Radar, boasts batteries that can power the system for up to three weeks on a single charge and also solar panels to charge those batteries.
“Having the solar panels and the four batteries just makes a lifetime of difference,” Tebbetts said. “We can keep it out a lot longer than normal. The old trailer, we would get a day, maybe a day and a half depending on traffic. This one we can virtually leave it out indefinitely, as long as there’s enough sun.”
Purchase of the new radar was a priority initiative by the City Council this year, alongside a revival of the department’s motorcycle program that will focus on traffic enforcement and management. The radar cost around $9,200.
Deployment will be based on historical traffic issues and resident complaints, Tebbetts said. Last week, it was placed on Sierra Madre near Huntley Circle, and this week it was repositioned on San Marino Avenue just north of Lorain Road.
“A lot of it’s going to be based on traffic complaints,” he said. “If a resident calls and says there’s too many speeders, we’ll probably set it up there. We should shortly have our motorcycle program up and running and they’ll be running the project.”
The need for the monitor at the Sierra Madre location was illustrated only too well for Tebbetts while he was putting it there, he said; the speed limit is 35 mph and the S-curve there creates blind spots for side street traffic, and it remains one of the city’s biggest speeding and collision hot spots.
“People were still doing 47 as I was setting it up,” Tebbetts said. “It’s displaying as I’m setting up the jacks, and I’m like ‘C’mon, people.’”
Additionally, while alerting motorists to their speeds, the radar also collects data for later analysis by the department. It gathers information on average speeds for each lane of traffic and what times those speeds are recorded, which will help the city more quickly figure out how to distribute other mitigation measures or officers.
“We can go download it daily, weekly, monthly,” Tebbetts explained. “It’s basically doing a roadway survey for us. It gives us almost any information you can think of.”
The department hopes the new technology, along with the motorcycle unit, will help improve traffic safety in the city, whose residents have more loudly aired their grievances about wayward motorists in recent years. Alongside other crime stats, the department frequently examines collision data as an operational focus.
“If we can prevent two or three accidents a year — hopefully more — then that it a game changer for us,” Tebbetts said.
