gatso vans?

mad m

just wondering do Gatso vans operate at night time?....was just driving by a Van marked out Garda in a place of no importance doing 35 in a 30mile zone and was wondering if im Fcuked....i seen these vans the first time they came out they were all Green but this van was a normal white Garda van.

Dan_B

They do work at night, usually parked in well lit up areas though.
You may not get done for doing 35, depends on how the camera is adjusted.

fletch

If it was night-time and you didn't see a flash then you should be ok...

Seth Brundle

fletch wrote:

If it was night-time and you didn't see a flash then you should be ok...

Gatso vans do not flash due to the picture being taken as you approach the van & they do not want to blind you. You are confusing vans with fixed cameras on the roadside!

ando

yeap, gatso's dont flash

Seth Brundle

the grey cameras at the side of the road are aso called Gatsos!

fletch

ando wrote:

yeap, gatso's dont flash

Well, mad m was driving at night time so without a flash there is not much chance of the camera picking up his number plate.

Seth Brundle

AFAIK the flash is pretty much to alert you that you were caught, not to brighten up the place.

ando

its illegal to flash a light directly at oncoming traffic, no?

sweeper4

kbannon wrote:

Gatso vans do not flash due to the picture being taken as you approach the van & they do not want to blind you. You are confusing vans with fixed cameras on the roadside!

I have seen Gatso vans flash on three occasions as people were caught speeding alongside me in overtaking lanes on dual carriageway.
I was also under the impression that all Gatso vans were unmarked, so if you say it was marked Garda I think you are safe (Open for correction on that one though).

alias no.9

I've seen 2 gatso vans recently both on the same road, auburn avenue in castleknock, on different days. Both were transits (late 90's model), one was white and one was bottle green. Neither had any garda markings. You can actually see the lens inside the back window of the van as you pass it but I've not seen it flash.

Seth Brundle

There used to be a site (www.speedtraps.ie.nu) which described the various tools used by Muldoon & Co Ltd. but it seems to have been removed from the net.
Anyway, Gatso vans do *not* flash you. They sit there with just a camera lens peeking out of a small hole through the blackened window of a transit or whatever. They photograph speeding motorists as they approach the vam (hence not flashing).

Fixed cameras are big grey boxes placed at the side of (often) safe straight stretches of road. They contain a radar gun, a camera and a flash unit. They are accompanied by a set of white markings on the same side of road. These flash twice as a speeding car passes by them, taking two pictures within a certain time period. the road markings are there for manual checking against the photos if the crime is defended.

this has all been discussed before so read http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=182838

Furp

The Fixed Gatso Speed Cameras at the side of the Road use a Flash because they work on Film technology like your standard throw-away film camera, therefore they need a flash once the light level falls enough to guarantee a proper exposure on the film.

The vans though work on different technology what they us is like an infra red high resolution video camera which is much more sensitive to light, they actually record you driving and then just take a frame out of that image when it is sent out in the post.

EDIT:Redshift below jsut confirmed that the Vans do have a flash but it is infr-red.

This website has a lot of info about the different types of cameras in the UK

http://www.ukspeedtraps.co.uk/gatso01.htm

There was another site before but I can't remember it now, which showed you what the garda have here, pictures of the vans and also showed you the equipment inside the car that can used for speeding as well as a motorcycle fitted with a camera that could catch speeding motorists.

Redshift

Just to clarify, Gatso vans do have a flash of sorts; two of them infact mounted beside the camera in the back window but you will not see them go off as they are infrared. Also they can work for traffic travelling both ways but not both ways at the same time so it is possible for a van parked on one side of the road of a single carrageway road to be catching drivers on the other side; they never do this though. Also a van operating at night will operate the other way around to catch the rear number plate because the headlights of an oncomming car will dazzle the camera making the plate unreadable.