426
Opinion of the Court
to a "seizure" in Fourth Amendment terms. E. g., Edmond, 531 U. S., at 40. That difference, however, is not important enough to justify an Edmond-type rule here. After all, as we have said, the motorist stop will likely be brief. Any accompanying traffic delay should prove no more onerous than many that typically accompany normal traffic congestion. And the resulting voluntary questioning of a motorist is as likely to prove important for police investigation as is the questioning of a pedestrian. Given these considerations, it would seem anomalous were the law (1) ordinarily to allow police freely to seek the voluntary cooperation of pedestrians but (2) ordinarily to forbid police to seek similar voluntary cooperation from motorists.
Finally, we do not believe that an Edmond-type rule is needed to prevent an unreasonable proliferation of police checkpoints. Cf. 202 Ill. 2d, at 9-10, 779 N. E. 2d, at 859- 860 (expressing that concern). Practical considerations— namely, limited police resources and community hostility to related traffic tieups—seem likely to inhibit any such proliferation. See Fell, Ferguson, Williams, & Fields, Why Aren't Sobriety Checkpoints Widely Adopted as an Enforcement Strategy in the United States? 35 Accident Analysis & Prevention 897 (Nov. 2003) (finding that sobriety checkpoints are not more widely used due to the lack of police resources and the lack of community support). And, of course, the Fourth Amendment's normal insistence that the stop be reasonable in context will still provide an important legal limitation on police use of this kind of information-seeking checkpoint.
These considerations, taken together, convince us that an Edmond-type presumptive rule of unconstitutionality does not apply here. That does not mean the stop is automatically, or even presumptively, constitutional. It simply means that we must judge its reasonableness, hence, its constitutionality, on the basis of the individual circumstances. And as this Court said in Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. 47, 51
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