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http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/specs.htm

There are probably more cameras than cars on the road.

There are roughly 6000 cameras on UK roads. Compare to 33 million cars. Stop spreading FUD.

Do you think they need to put something in your car to know where you are?

If you're going to implement road pricing, then yes. The alternative is installing cameras on every road in the country.

With automatic face recognition software that won't be necessary.

Oh, and Automatic Number Plate Reading (ANPR) can be used for monitoring the speed of vehicles and is then called SPECS.

... This has nothing/little to do with terrorism and it's unlikely to cut "real" crime.

For example the Yorkshire Ripper was caught by a Policeman doing his job, pulling over a car with dodge plates, and arrested him. Cameras wouldn't have caught him

Light fingered burglers don't tend to drive to commit their crimes either....

The main reason I can see for this is to (yet again) punish motorists who are speeding. The theory is simple. Cameras can monitor have far you have travelled, and they know the distance, ergo work out the speed. This already exist it appears to know be used to cover ALL the country and ALL travel. - Just THINK of the profit^H^H^H^H^H taxes^H^H^H^H^H "fines that will be reinvested" the government will get

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever

Jaj

The speed camera that takes the most money in fines on UK roads is on the A610 - a road joining Nottingham city centre to the M1 motorway. Last time I checked it accounted for a third of all speeding fines in the country (Feb 05). It's a SPECS system that uses automatic number plate recognition to calculate the time taken to travel between two fixed cameras.

Incidentally, your GPS gadget already exists, more or less.

In Norway they have done something even more extreme. They have a camera taking your picture at one place, then several kilometers further down they take a new picture and calculate how fast you have driven between the two cameras, basically, your speed on average must meet the speed limit on average over quite a distance... They are testing this solution right now and it most likely will be legal to set it up.

We've had these in Britain for a while now, it's called SPECS over here. The first such system was set up here in 2000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/468150 7.stm
http://www.abd.org.uk/specs.htm
http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/SPECS.htm

Anyway, we already have speed camera systems that do exactly what you've said, called SPECS