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Cameras in UK for Toll Enforcement
cosyne writes "Saw this story on BBC News about charging people £5 per day to drive in central London. The interesting part: they plan to use surveillance cameras to snap liscence plates and compare to a database of people who paid. That's the same as stopping terrorism, right?" We mentioned this issue in an earlier story. It's an interesting challenge: the UK authorities have a problem (too much traffic in London) which is not susceptible to the usual solution (too many ways into London, can't put tolls on all of them) and so they're looking for new solutions - except most of the possible solutions are privacy-invasive in one way or another.
How is having information that you present (your license plate number) recorded an "invasion of privacy"?
For Troll enforcement. Get it? Toll -> troll.
Hahaha!
-- Anonymous Cowfart
This comment would have been at -1 too, if i weren't for the two comments per day-limit. Write your Slashdot representative now!
"shutter" device that fits on top of license plate, and can "open" and "close"... controllable from inside the car. Simply "close" the shutter" to prevent picture of license plate from being snapped. :-) Open it immediately thereafter so that cops don't nail you for driving without plates.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Highway 407 north of Toronto has had this for years. They do it a little differently in that they sell transponders to frequent users and only take pictures of vehicles that don't have the transponders. Whether you have a transponder or not, you get a bill in the mail for using the highway.
The problem here isn't privacy, but rather the fact that a private company manages the highway. If they send you a bill and you disagree with the charges they can keep you from getting your license/vehicle permit renewed. I don't like it when private companies can get you by the balls like that.
Aside from that, it's not a bad system.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
"too many ways into London, can't put tolls on all of them"
That's BS.. There's tons of roads going in and out of "my own" capital (Oslo). They just put up a ring of booths all around it. The cost of a booth should be made up in a single day worth of tolls, I would imagine. Granted, London is a billion times larger, but then again that means a lot more cars so it should scale.
The trick is to not toll the road, the toll is for entering/polluting the city. It's a traffic control measure, not a "pay for the road you're driving on" kinda thing.
Also, it doesn't do jack diddley squat for the amount of traffic so all it ends up being is extra money for the govt to use on anything but roads and car related issues.
except most of the possible solutions are privacy-invasive in one way or another.
Here in the UK, a variety of new laws have made protection of privacy paramount in almost all private and commercial transactions. Pretty well the only exceptions allowable are those that the government has allowed itself.
There are currently new rules being made which allow almost any government department, QUANGO, or local council to overrule the privacy laws for almost any reason.
Big Brother rules OK!
This whole policy smells of a way of providing clearer roads for the affluent at the expense of the working man.
This is all the more suprising as the deal is being brought in by a left wing mayor (also known for throwing the comman man off low walls)
Get those Skodas and Fords off the road, I'm comming through in my BMW
The *sarcasm*glorious*sarcasm* Citylink freeway in Melbourne is the same, except all cars do get photographed.
For those who have paid for a 'day pass', when you don't have a transponder fitted, this photo of your licence plate is married to a payment you make via phone.
I also have a problem with a private company 'owning' this portion of our freeway, especially as a chunk of it used to be 'free'. As such that major way into the city is no longer used by myself in my car as I wish to not support them.
(Of course, they also have the oh so great tunnel under our mighty river, the Yarra. This tunnel flooded initially, leaks intermitently, and was only designed to last 30 years... what happens after that I don't know, but I'd prefer not to be driving in it at the time.)
as ``Cameras in UK for Troll Enforcement''.
:)
Something that would be of use around here perhaps...
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
Well just on first gloss, this seems like a bad idea. The idea, apparently, is that traffic is so bad in central London that they want to discourage people from driving in, and encourage them to use public transportation instead -- which kind of makes sense. One problem is that, like all other regressive taxes, this "fee" is essentially meaningless to those with enough money. Of course, this is £1300 a year if you drive into London 5 days a week, every week -- think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island! (Personally, I'm against any scheme in which a citizen of a nation is charged money by the government to travel to or across particular public lands. They're public lands! Public!)
Then there's the issue of privacy -- the government randomly recording peoples' presence and location to see if they've paid this tax. Yeah, that's a nasty one. If you provide public transportation which is cheaper than driving, people will use it, you don't need to essentially force them to do so by charging an arm and a leg.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Give credit where it's due. The word is "licence" if it's a noun, as in "licence plate" and "license" if it's a verb as in "I license you to use my software".
The writer, uncertain of the rule, was simply catering for either possibility.
"licence" is proper spelling in the UK.
Moron.
...they can send you a bill even when you're trying to screw with your friends and drive their cars into town...
The technology to do this has existed for quite some time. They've been using this for speed- and red-light-cameras for years. It's recently been put into practice in "tollboothless" tollways such as CityLink (in Melbourne). Here's a description of how it works (look under the section "Travel on CityLink"). I'm told that it even works halfway decently, for various values of "works". (Except for the likely umpteen followups who have counterexamples.)
The CityLink toll was applied to a road that used to be free. There was much furore over this at the time, with people suggesting that the traffic would be worse in surrounding areas as cheapskate drivers looked for alternate routes. Now that the whole thing has been ironed out and in production for a couple of years, the protests have largely died away and we have a pay-per-use road that is very, very useful for getting across town (if you can afford the toll). The traffic isn't significantly worse in surrounding streets. Here is a vaguely independent report on CityLink by Victoria's motoring club.
Now it looks like it's London's turn to go through the same thing.
www.transurban.com.au
Then it's not exactly an invasion of privacy.
A traffic warden looking at your car number plate on the street isn't invading your privacy and neither is this. It's just the scale and organisation behind this that makes it scary, not the action being performed.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Is Civil Disobedience permitted in the UK?
Find the Cameras.
Put some electrical tape on the lens.
Repeat as neccesary.
As long as you don't do actual damage to the camera, and it's a simple matter to fix, they can't really charge you with destroying it, right?
And if they have to send a person out to remove the tape every day from 90% of the camera setups....
Seems pretty basic, to me.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
It's a quote from a written correspondence, get over it.
You should look at it again they spell it "liscence".
Moron.
Hasn't the Patriot Act started to erode those rights?
I know for sure it allows "invasion of privacy" for wiretaps without a warrant -- and I've heard something about physical searches with "blank warrants" or something like that... Just a matter of time, I suppose.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/1105carrier.htmNo, it isn't. Please bear in mind that the UK has sadly been having to deal with terrorism, and attacks on its soil, for rather longer than the US. Anti-terrorist measure are a well understood thing in London, and the public certainly doesn't get to see all of it.
Cheers,
Ian
but dont spend any of it to reduce pollution, build better roads, just use it to finance the millions of welfare slugs, and old pensioners, and useless departments.
They have been doing this for years on the outer ring road of London at a place called the Dartford Tunnel.
It's not on a charging basis, they simply OCR your plate and store it with a time stamp and direction. They say it's purely for measuring the traffic flows but I know that in cases of emergency then the "authorities" can search the records.
give them a break, they're british.
I disagree. Cheaper is usually not enough. It also has to be convenient. Personally, I don't use public transportation very often (never where I live, and only rarely when I visit other places) because it's just plain inconvenient (side note: I also enjoy driving my car, which means public transportation has to be able to provide an even higher utility for me to choose to use it). I disagree with taxing other forms of travel to encourage use of public transportation. If you want me to use it, make it affordable and convenient, and provide me with benefits that I won't get by driving my car (not necessarily monetary, either. Even with current gas prices, I'd still choose to drive than ride the transit system).
I guess if I were in a more populous area (Seattle only counts if you're in the downtown area, which I'm not) public transportation would be a more viable option. However, I'm not, and the current implementations here are not viable for me. Therefore, I don't use it even though 50% of my registration renewal fee is a public transportation tax.
Many toll booths have a membership option - allowing regular users to faststream through a set of lanes by simply swiping a card or having a barcode on their dash read.
All this does is extend this to ALL traffic.
The only problem as I see it is that I can be being charged for a service without having it made clear to me that I am going to have to pay.
Using the classic government approach, "they" are also going to rig the implementation of this. The major routes in London really depend on traffic light phasing - and this has been seriously screwed up in the last few months. As a consequence traffic jams have appeared where none were before. Then "they" will switch on the congestion charge, fix the phasing, and claim that congestion charging is the saviour of London.
Oh well, if it gets the poor in their crappy Mazdas off the road...er...I thought the Mayor was a socialist...
(if anyone doesn't believe this, go check out the City Road/Old Street roundabout. There is a jam there, going towards Angel that is solely caused by the lights. The junction has been physically the same for all of the 30 years I have known it - and suddenly the traffic is screwed. Wonder why...oh yes, this is the boundary of the congestion charge zone)
Your privacy does not extend to the effects of light rays bouncing off you and your vehicle in a public place. If you're that paranoid about being seen you probably shouldn't be operating a motor vehicle either.
This is not new. In Melbourne, Australia, a system operating on similar principles for a few years - http://www.perceptics.com/files/LPR.pdf.
Speed cameras here also operate in the same way, and have done so for years. No human will even see your traffic fine after it leaves the police van. The images get transferred back to the central computer, which then scan & enhance it, print the infringement notice and stuff it into a envelope. I assume a human carries it down to the post office. But it can't be to far off before the dammed things are delivered by email.
Scott McNeally's off the cuff comment Privacy is dead, deal with it! is spot on. Slashdotters may have as much trouble accepting that as the RIAA has accepting the way technology has gutted copyright, but the genie is out of the bottle. You can't put it back. No one is going to tear down the cameras that take 300 pictures of your average Londoner a day. No one is going to stop the hire car companies tracking you via satellite. Nobody is going to stop the police tracking your movements by asking Blockbuster when and where you last hired out movies.
David Brin was right. Trying to stop the collection is a lost cause. Instead fight to make your right to know who is collecting such information, what they have collected, and most importantly who has accessed it. If we can't keep their fingers out of our packets, at least we can keep the bastards honest!
The usual IANAL,
but my understanding of how it is in America,
is that all of your rights and freedoms are granted to you by the state (I don't mean like in the 50 states of the US, I mean the more abstract "state") and as such they have the right to restrict your freedoms to a degree.
Yes, the bill of rights grants the freedom to move, but not to tresspass. This is the same logic that puts the FCC in charge of the "air" and its bandwith spectrum.
Now, on to your public transpo comment:
unless you get to an underground station (I must admit I don't know much about London public transpo) you still have to use the roads (from what I understand you wouldn't want to use the rails!) and if there is more traffic the public transpo bus is bottlenecked by all the damn cars!
So if you reduce the number of cars on the road, you improve the efficiency of buses, thus making them a more attractive alternative. You have to boot-strap somehow!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This has already been done for the last 4 years here in Ontario, Canada. The only Toll highway we have uses camera's to snap your rear license plate and you get a bill in the mail 407 ETR website [407etr.com]
There are already security checkpoints on every route into the city (chicane, bollards, high mounted light and camera). Adding toll infrastructurewould be an incremental cost.
Andrew
Oh, sorry, misread. I thought the headline said "Cameras in UK for Troll Enforcement".
Bummer
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
the patriot act erodes away at this but it doesn't do away with it... there still has to be "probable cause"... as for exactly what that is has always been debated...
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
If you think this is bad, wait for the new tube tickets. At present to access the underground (Subway, Metro, call it what you will), you put a cardboard ticket in a slot. The magnetic stripe is read and the ticket is spat out. You remove your ticket, the gate opens and off you go.
With the new system you merely wave a card near a reader on the machine. London Underground are currently claiming that you shouldn't even need to take the ticket out of your bag. Ok, I've worked in buildings with card controlled access like this in the past, and I'm not sure this will actually work, but that is another rant.
Once these are accepted, all Joe Privacy invader needs to do is hook up these readers at entrances to stores, restuarants, etc.
The cameras have nothing on this!
fuck it, what you need is this.
c-hack.com |
Instead of spending money on this system why not giving free access to the public transport system to everyone who shows a valid ticket from a park&ride facility outside the city...
I'm sure People would like the idea of a free ride thru the city instead of spending money for fuel and wasting time in traffic jams...
I live in Oslo. What I heard was that it required several years just to cover the financial expenditure of the toll booths. These things are never done cheaply, mainly because of incompetent politicians.
Ask anybody driving in Oslo, or Norway, they all think the booths are a bad idea. You're absolutely right it does nothing to regulate traffic (if they wanted that, they should make it 10 or 100 times as expensive). In fact, the toll booths create longer queues. Every approach at a tollboth will have a more dense traffic-jam. Now, if the politicians REALLY cared about the environment AND had a clue, they would get rid of the booths. It shouldn't take a genius to understand that traffic-jams are actually worse for both the environment and us.
The system is unjust for those that live just outside the ring too. Besides, owning a car is already so expensive in Norway, that adding even more charges is just laughable. For those who wants to drive through/around Oslo, there should be a choice right? Wrong, you usually HAVE to go through the booths.. So this is clearly a scheme just to collect money from people. It has little to do with the environment.
No, don't model Oslo, or Norway for that matter. The car-politics in this country is completely void of "common" sense. Heck, London probably has much better traffic than Oslo compared to the size of the city, with all its round-abouts and being booth-free.
"Above all we need to have a proper public transport infrastructure before a congestion charging scheme can be introduced"
I thought London had a developed underground railway and train network? Pardon my ignorance, I've never been there - can anyone comment on what this comment meant?
--jquirke
The least they could do is insert a (sic) next to a missplet[sic] word
Ah, the irony of a spelling mistake in a post complaining about spelling mistakes...
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They couldjust random pick someone and verify is condition, wait someone tdid that 50 years ago.............
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
that matters.
Whenever, authorities take such steps laws should be passed that specifically bar any other use or prevent abuse.
For example, if you install cameras to track terrorists pass a law that states that they will not be used for anything else.
'course that isn't about to happen but
you wonder if one is driving around in a van with a married couple having sex in the back, will the owner be cited for indecent exposure?
There will be discounts for residents and exemptions for certain professions.
If I was London right now, I'd join a union.
Webminster Council will argue that Major CmdrTaco's decision to introduce the conversation chargers from last February is in breach of netizens' copy lefts.
Score:1, Unread
Whats the point of the fourth amendment? There's so many people that dont want or need the fourth amendment .. so why dont they just come out and say that we should get rid of it?!
... it all comes down to whether a society or civilization wishes to deny those rights to certain people.
All individual human being's rights come from their CREATOR (and America's founding fathers agree, read the second paragraph of the declaration of independence), not from government, and it's not dependent on societal needs.
And no matter what the PATRIOT Act, constitutional amendments, or police do, they cannot undo the fact that all people have the God given right to privacy
Not a bad idea per-se, but I was wondering how you are going to get billed for this.
For example, I have to drive to London today, I recon it's going to take about 4 hours, that's 2 hours to reach the outskirts and another 2 to get to where I'm going.
Now I'd quite like to use public transport, however I shall be carrying a rackmount server, which I can just about carry, and a pile of hard drives, not something I want to try to lug on and off the tube!
This system isn't going to make a damn bit of difference for those people rich enough to drive in London anyway, I just wondered about the logistics of trying to bill me for my £5...
Not that I object to it that much... anything to make the roads less congested.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
If you own a car, you have no privacy.
The government already has all your personal details on record. Your address, date and city of birth, type of car (or cars) you own, approximate mileage you do in a year (although that bit's optional, but it's a good idea because it stops people tampering with the speedometer), and much more besides. It's all legally required for owning a car. Even if you own one, but don't keep it registered, you must register it as out of use and keep it off the road.
Just to recap, if you own a car, the government already knows about it. They're not really that interested in you though.
Yes, there's too much traffic in London.
Pricing the less well off motorists out of the city is just a quick hack solution to a more serious problem. The bulk of the traffic problem is in the morning, and evening, as people go to/from work. During working hours, while it's busy, it's not that often actually gridlocked, and most of the traffic seems to be buses and taxis, and delivery vans.
During the rush hours, guess what? The trains, buses, taxis, and the underground system are all full PAST CAPACITY.
There's a bigger problem here, and basically extorting a few more quid from car drivers for the public purse is not going to solve anything.
Unfortunately it seems typical of our current dictat^H^H^H^H^H^H^H government.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
It becomes an invasion of privacy when the records of your whereabouts are kept. If this information was just used for billing and then destroyed it would be ok, but will it be destroyed?
Of course not! It is too easy to keep it, and too useful for 'other purposes'.
It is those 'other purposes' that constitute an invasion of privacy. As soon as you cannot move along a street without being challenged to explain your reasons for doing so (as is potentially the case here), your privacy has been invaded.
Freedom to go where you please throughout public territory, without explaining yourself to anyone, is a great good.
except most of the possible solutions are privacy-invasive in one way or another.
So, what DO we have number plates for exactly? I thought it was to identify cars. How is taking a picture of you driving around in a public place an invasion of privacy? Oh, i know, im not allowed to know waht ure doing!! Well guess what, these people dont care WHAT you are doing, no matter how many conspiracy theories you put together. All they are interested in is finding nonpayers, same as the police are interested in finding speeding moterists with speed cameras.
Here in the UK, among motorists there is a growing feeling of being "picked on" by the police or government. We have traffic problems all over the place, and one of the governments manifestoes was to get people off the roads in private transportation, and onto public transportation. They are not doing this by improving public transportation, but by making it easier to penalise the motorist. Guess why? Cause theres so many motorists, a lot of them are bound to either speed, travel in bus lanes, or go places without paying tolls. And what can u get off these people? yep, fines. And that means more money to the government.
Schemes like this are not designed to reduce the number of cars as a primary concern, they are there as a money making revenue for the UK government. Oh, and considering their recent RIP bill and stuff, i wouldnt worry about privacy, its already taken care of..
I live in London and I think this is possibly going to be a good thing. I travel about four and a half miles to work each day. In the car, it used to take me three quarters of an hour if I left at 7:30am. For a person used to the traffic on the anywhere else it is just unbelieveable. I am serious when I say that I live in the bit of North London that Londoners percieve to have "free flowing traffic"! I am not joking on this. 11 miles an hour is the best you can get in London. In the zone that the mayor is proposing to cordon off the peak average speed is three miles per hour. Just read that again if you don't live in the UK. London is choking to death on cars.
I now ride my bicycle and in the 6 months I've been doing it I get to work much faster (28 minutes including riding up Muswell Hill!) but I have been smashed off twice by w**kers too frustrated to notice the bicycle in front of them. Anything that reduces the numbers of cars so buses can function and the remainder can flow is a good thing.
It's a vicious circle, and something has to be done to break the cycle (pun intended!). I'm interested in the subject and I've not heard of any alternatives that make sense in terms of London's particular mess.
The only thing I am disappointed about is the size of the zone isn't as large as it could be. Still, for a first-time-anywhere experiment it's damn ambitious.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
In the UK, we have laws, protected by UK law and European law that is basically the same as the US 5th amendment, saying theres no way i can be forced to incriminate myself.
The bill is sent to the owner of the car, but only the driver of the car is liable, not the car itself. These fines have to ask you to disclose who was driving at the time, same as speeding offences. Just say you do not know who was driving at the time, that a number of people could have been driving. This has been used a number of times, and has been upheld in a court of law on several occasions (due to the UKs abysmal online record keeping, i cant find a link).
There ya go. Dont deny the car was there, cause its not the cars fault, jsut claim you cant tell who the driver was.
Gosh, I wish private firearms were legal over here. Then we could resist the state's endless desire to control our lives, like you lucky people in the USA.
On a more serious note... *shrug* who cares? Cars are a menace, anything that discourages their use is a good thing in my book. (Hope that doesn't sound like a troll; it really is what I think.) Civil liberties angle? Pffft, this is the country where you can be jailed for five years for losing your PGP provate key, and the same again for telling third parties that the Govt. has seized your keys (and thus encrypted communication is compromised.) There are five CCTV cameras between me and my local pub. But I haven't been mugged (or in deed a victim of any crime) in 7 years in Brixton, supposedly the crime centre of the London inner city according to the Daily Fascis^h^h Mail.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
We're not british, we're British
Road pricing is an excellent idea. It enables goods and services delivered in areas where demand is high to be priced appropriately. Yes the rich will always be able to afford to travel on expensive roads, but for many reasons (particularly if one has to park once in the expensive area) these areas are off limits to less well off drivers anyway.
:-)
The advantage of road pricing (use whatever label you like, congestion charging included) is that it will build the coffers of the public transport infrastructure whilst establishing the correct barrier to entry to reduce the volume of traffic.
I have lived in central London (inside the proposed charging region) for many years and I know of only one person in my circle of friends who drives in central london and that's only because he thinks it important. I know of noone in my circle of professional acquaintances that drives into central london (and many of these are working in middle to upper management in the financial industry). It is just not sane to drive into central london. People who think they need to should be made to pay extortionately (with the obvious exception of PT and anyone who must for reasons they cannot control, disability for example). Because they don't really.
Two things in addition. The tube network is, in comparison to some of the cities I know, actually very good (when it works). The problem is the incredible volume of passengers compared to the infrastructure. Any subway system should be compared with moscow when looking at the path for improvement and London's problem is two fold. The way to increase passenger throughput is to increase the number of trains on any given line, but that requires massive changes to signalling infrastructure to ensure safety. Second, you have to get them on and off the trains and out to ground level in good time. And many of the busiest london stations are a nightmare in this regard. The solution requires funding and the funding source must be road pricing
Secondly and this is my little bug bear. Is that it should be fscking illegal to drive a delivery truck into central london during business hours. All that stuff should be done at night. That would solve half the problems right away.
Don't even start me on digging up roads to lay cables.
$0.02
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Actually those were thrown out almost instantly by the home office.
See Trafficmaster's web page.
By driving a car on the public highway in the UK, you are agreeing to a series of conditions, such as displaying a registration that can be traced back to you, having insurance, paying road tax, etc. You could not run a road system as big as the UKs without this. That registration number is there for a reason - so your car can be traced back to the owner.
Would it be OK if someone stood by the road noting down all the registrations of the cars that passed? It seems that this is a story because cameras are involved. There are cameras all over the UK's roads allready - some to discourage traffic offenses, others to track traffic flow (the TrafficMaster System), and undoubtably others which keep track of you going in to 'sensitive' areas. If you dont like this - dont drive a car in the UK.
The real story here is that driver who want to avoid the congestion charge will simply go around the city, moving the congestion and polution to other, currently quiet roads, and that there has been no investment in public transport to give a viable alternative to driving.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
But it would be better if we could ditch the punitive mindset and try an incentive based one. If there is one overwhelming motivating force to coerce the people into public transport, it's money. London has too much traffic and an underused public transport system so why not subsidize busses and trains? or bicycles?
I'm guessing they have thought of this, but the real reason behind this plan is probably to raise revenue through indirect taxation. My state government (Queensland, Australia) does exactly the same thing with speeding/red-light cameras.
Why don't they just make lots of transit lanes and let the cars battle it out. The public transport users get what they want and the car users who are stupid enough to continue get what they are asking for.
Note that trafficmaster doesn't grab the whole numberplate -- they don't want to know _who_ you were just that there was indeed a car there.
When they built these boxes they made sure that whole numberplates were never ever recorded for privacy reasons.
This sounds nice but would result in your car being illegal and therefore subject to a fine much greater than the £5 you are trying to avoid.
A simpler answer in a city which has the oldest underground system would be... to use public transport. As someone who uses it every day it amazes me that people don't go totally postal waiting in queues all the time in their cars.
Example: Saturday night going from St. James' to Charing Cross, we got out of the cab at the end of the Mall (which is not pronounced Maul) and walked the rest as it would have taken three times as long in the cab.
London is not a city designed for cars, and personally I'm all in favour of scaming the stupid who insist on driving.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In lots of other cities in the UK, issue with London is that there are people so stupid that they will still insist on driving their cars in rather than mixing with the "masses" on public transport.
Personally I look on this as a tax on the rich who refuse to ride on public transport. Now if they only had decent cycle lanes for bikes and bladers I'd miss out on the tube section of my journey.
As a reference for our US cousins, it takes in rush hour around 20 mins to go from the 'burbs into the centre if you take the tube, it takes around an hour if you drive.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The number plate is "owned" by the DVLA, while you can buy it and have "ownership" at the end of the day the DVLA can revoke it so it ceases to become valid, and travelling with an invalid number is illegal.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Speaking as one who occasionally has to drive into London, £5 wouldn't make me think twice. The alternative so called public transport system would cost me more than twice what it costs me to drive - even with the £5 addition (thats if I go on my own - if I have a colleague with me, the gap is even wider in favour of the motorist). Public Transport is also less reliable (in the past 18 months, we've never missed meetings when using our own vehicles and have twice been late for meetings when relying on public transport) and doesn't get you where you actually need to go. Finally, if, as we often do, you need to cart reasonably bulky gear around (computers, ohps etc), then a)taking it on public transport is virtually impossible and b)carrying it up to 3/4 of a mile from the public transport exit to your actual destination is utterly impractical. All in all, £5 still represents a good deal. And if they really do use the money to improve Public Transport, that can only be a good thing. Having said all that, the Privacy issue is a genuine concern. Not for the reasons I've seen mentioned here. If the plates are scanned, checked for payment and the data discarded, I see no real problem. The question is, is that all they'll do with the data? What ELSE might that data be used for? Someone else has already referred to the UK's anti-terrorism experience. The relevant experience is what they did (and still routinely do, I believe) in Northern Ireland. Here the licence plates are regularly photographed and the data is used to track the movement of all vehicles - whether or not they belong to "suspects". My guess is that this technique is about to come to the Capital. Mere gathering of data is, of course, not a threat to anyone. Unconditional trust, however, in those who will control access to that data, and the uses the unscrupulous control freak might make of such data; these are what should give us cause for legitimate concern.
£165 a year to tax my car. £8 on every £10 of fuel I buy goes to the government. Huge speeding tax fines. Forced expensive insurance. Residential parking tax... And now they want me to pay to drive into London. This makes me very angry. I know it will spread to my town if it is sucessful.
It also makes me angry when I see the government introducing this before upgrading the underground tube and the bus system.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
As far as I understand it, this plan is NOT the work of the UK Government, instead this highly controversial scheme has been put forward by the Mayor of London.
Read about this Congestion Charging scheme here.
In fact, there is a challenge to this scheme being mounted in the High Court today (Monday).
The reason there are so many cameras in London, is because of all the terrorists who have kept trying to blow bits of it up over the years. Terrorists, largely funded by US Citizens, who have in the past come close to destroying parts of London's financial centre.
Personally, I think you have to be an idiot to want to drive into London, and I'm all in favour of this scheme, but I would like to see the charge doubled for people driving SUVs...
"Information wants to be paid"
Those checkpoints are only on every route into the City (financial district). The main congestion is in the West End, which has no checkpoints (as yet)
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
most people (like me) who live in London are a little bit annoyed at having to pay £1200 extra per year to drive in our own city, but accept it as a necessary evil. i live 1 mile outside the charging zone - it can take 45 minutes to travel 3 miles across town during a bad day.
we already have speed + traffic cameras at many sets of traffic lights, and security roadblocks in the central business district (the City) for the past 8 years have meant that people here are cool/used to the invasion of privacy..
like many cities, the traffic in London is very bad during school months at school times - around 4pm every day, as all the mums + dads pick up their 6 year old in a huge four-wheel drive, London grinds to a halt. there should be strict car-sharing rules around schools, would soon solve the problem. for some reason, we've never quite got our heads round the idea of School Buses either...
Whats the point? everyone has to pay some kind of raod tax to drive a car - you dont have cameras all over the place scanning plates for that - you jut make everyone put a tax disc in the window! most lawabiding citizens wont try to get away without paying if they have to show a permit in their window. Lets look at the costs:
Installing 100's of cameras around london, connecting them to a central computer with the proccessing power to analyse 100's of number plates per second and compare them to a database - allot of f*cking money.
Issuing peices of paper and those little plastic sleave things to put them in - f*cking jack.
All this because the dumb politicians/mayors have no idea whats going on. They no nothing about the tecnology around, they no nothing about its cost, and they no nothing about designing a system to do a job - why not just hire people with a clue.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
And there's cameras all around NYC and other large population centers over in the US, as well.
Only a matter of time before they start tagging our license plates and billing us, too.
Ever see the movie Demolition Man?
It's where the world's headed. Be well, citizen.
It'd be cool if there were, like, this city where there was, like, no privacy and stuff. And you go there and there are cameras everywhere and, like, no one is picking their nose and stuff and everyone is super good-looking and stuff. And then there's this other city that's cool cos it's all dark and stuff and everything is private and you can buy drugs there and gamble and it's like this underworld place, and all sorts of weird shit goes on there.
(I realize this is a stupid posting. Oh well)
How can this comment be called a troll? It is an obvious observation. it seems that there are those in the /. community that want to censor opinions that they do not like.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
It's designed for bikes, but a flip-plate, controlled by the rider, already exists.
Alternatively, there's the Priva-Plate which just uses a big LCD block over the number. Press a button in the car and it greys out your plate. Neat.
Monitoring traffic going in and out of London has been going on for years though - all that's new about this is that they're planning to charge people for it.
In listening to the BBC here in England, I've heard discussion where the government will be putting a lot more money into the road system because more and more (and more, etc) people are driving instead of taking public transportation.
I think they're missing the whole problem, which is that people often feel that they have to drive their own car because they can't rely on the public transportation.
If the public transportation were usable, reliable, reasonably clean and reasonably priced, people would use it instead of sitting in traffic for hours, paying large amounts for parking in the city, paying five pounds a day toll, etc.
Lars
Public Sector Workers use public transport. Usually buses, because PSWs can't afford to live near a tube or train station (overlooking a line, maybe, that's cheaper, but not actually by the station as all the housing goes to middle-class commuters). They can't afford to pay car downpayments, tax, petrol, residential parking fees and parking at work fees.
What you need is a camera flashgun fitted next to your licence plate with a slave firing unit. It senses the flash of their camera and fires back fogging the film...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
So, okay, they take a picture of your number plate. Then what? It means that GLA (London Authority) now has access to the numberplate database currently kept private by the DVLA (only the Police and Military have access to that at the moment). So it is an invasion of privacy- the more people who have access to the information, the more the chance of leaks. This sort of problem is the same with ID cards. It's not the card, but the database required to maintain them which is the problem.
However, London has a major roads crisis. Loads of people commute to work. The underground is overcrowded and badly run, the buses are a terrible service, life expectancy for cyclists is low. Walking is a good option if you don't have to travel far, and don't mind breathing really bad air.
Maybe it is time to look at decentralised office networks. The technology has been around a while...
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
How are they going to tell the differance between people who live in london and don't own a car and but have borrowed one to driver OUT OF LONDON for the day/ever!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If you build an database with this info and them use it with another database who tells when and where you use a cash machine and another database who tells what you buy and where. And even another db with your criminal records, medical records, edu records, etc., then you can use Data Mininig techniqes to profile people and gather them in groups. Those groups could be surveilleid if some criteria match with a profile considered dangerous
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
"The UK authorities have a problem (too much traffic in London)"
No, they don't. The PROBLEM is that the crappy infrastructure in London doesn't allow for the amount of traffic that there is, and has always been. Road infrastructure provision in London is a joke - and the chaos is exacerbated at every turn by incompetent politicians (eg John Prescott) implementing ridiculous schemes like the M4 bus lane. None of the congestion charging crap is necessary, the money would be far better spent ironing the creases and bottlenecks out of the existing system and then upgrading it in a strategic fashion. By the time anything like that happens I'll probably be taking the flying pig express to work.
That was classic intercourse!
To pull a little sense out of that nonsense...
If 20 bicyclists get hit by cars and die in london every year.. I have a question. How many car drivers get hit by other cars and killed in london every year?
they've been doing the same thing in Oklahoma on thier turnpike system for 5 years now. Several cities are also doing this for red light runners.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Cameras everywhere in the UK haven't done much to prevent crime, so what is the point?
Perhaps Prince Charles just wants to catch a view of your nickers?
I don't suppose Ken Livingstone wants to go this far but wouldn't it be lovely to have towns without cars: Kids playing in the street, no pollution, peace and quite, less asthma, shops you can walk to .....
Why doesn't our so-called market economy cater for people like me ... and lots of people I know
"largely funded by US Citizens"
Yes, really inexcusable.
I apologize for my stupid countrymen.
Still, your obsession with cameras is quite a site to behold. I expect we'll have the same thing in a few years.
Too bad.
In an earlier era, there was "new land" to move to (i.e. the americas, africa, india) when things got like this.
But now, we're all stuck on this rock, governments are squeezing us ever more tightly and some governments (continental europe) are giving up sovereignty so there's no practical hope of representative democracy there.
Just rules by committee who only answer to ministers who are appointed by a prime minister who was appointed by your local MP.
Situation looks ripe for revolution, if you ask me.
I live in central London but do not currently own a car. Taxi journeys can be expensive. Buses take a lot longer than the tube. Congestion in central London causes journeys through the centre to take an inordinate amount of time and as someone has pointed out, there are so many routes that tolls are impractical.
Whilst one would obviously have concerns over who gets to see where one's been travelling, there should be few legitimate concerns. If an area becomes so heavily utilised by traffic that it requires payments to reduce the demand on it then this is surely an efficient way of doing it.
Privay is hardly an issue. I use a yearly tube card registered in my name theoretically giving anyone at LT the ability to see every station I've visted in the past year. But the purpose of LT is to provide this service so qualms over what they see are unfounded. As are those of any nubmer-plate-payment service.
- The invasion of privacy, if there is one at all, depends entirely on how the data from the cameras is handled. The license-plate checking is done via OCR, and the whole system is automated; if only toll-offenders are recorded, and the rest are stored as anonymous statistics (i.e., 100 cars/hour, not "Joe Bloggs of 28 Hawley Crescent, Lower Godawfulminging, Surrey passed through here at 10:05am"), I see no gross invasion of privacy. This is the most likely way to handle things anyway, due to the amount of traffic (real and digital) involved and the amount of storage required).
- For an invasion of privacy to truly occur (and this is my opinion, not the law), the cameras would have to track individual license plates across the city, and link the license plate to an individual's personal data. The fact is that a license plate isn't private data, it's an official identification number, and it's perfectly possible to collect toll money on a car without directly linking it to its owner's personal details (though such things could be done easily if a court of law has requisitioned that data). It's ineffective to do so automatically anyway, since cars change owners unpredictably.
- The UK is the most surveilled country on the planet; I'd rather see strict controls on who's on the other end of the cameras and how that collected data is handled than simply banning the cameras.
- The attitude toward driving in the UK, especially around London, is vastly different from the US. My understanding is that public transport in, say, California, carries a stigma of poverty or "immigrant" with it, whereas in London it's a fact of life.
- Driving in London, even without the traffic, is an incredible pain in the arse. There's no grid system, the signposting is sparse and often misleading, and if you think you're going to find a parking space in central london, forget it. If toll money goes to improving those things, there'll be a decrease in congestion simply because people know where they're going! If toll money also prevents London Underground from going "public-private" then I'm all for it too.
- People who already live in London shouldn't have to pay the toll, so already it's a pretty fair tax (we have enough pollution of our own, we don't need commuters to import their own
:) - Someone said here it's tolling the poor to make more room on the roads for the rich, but only rich people can afford to commute by car into London anyway; unlike the US, we pay a hell of a lot for our fuel, and idling in city traffic jams eats a lot of it up. In almost all cases it's cheaper to use public transport than own, maintain, and drive a car into London every day (let alone pay for the parking), and a significant portion of us do just that.
An automated system that uses cameras, retains only the details of offending cars, and links license plates to an account that can be owned by anyone is cheaper, faster, and makes more sense from both a technical and a physical point of view. Additionally, the person who pays the toll doesn't necessarily have to be the owner of the car; this makes sense because a whole bunch of people driving into the city are using company cars, company-subsidised cars, or are carpooling. Those concerned about their privacy could pay a third party to handle tolls on their behalf.Finally, this kind of system is virtually guaranteed if the system is to be maintained by a private company: they simply won't have legal access to private car owner information. We have laws in this country, you know :)
It's licence where the word is used as a noun, license it used when it is a verb.
-- BtB
Yeah and then I want them to sell the information to my insurance company who can then jack my premiums based solely on where I drove, maybe only once. Then I want my bank to play with the car loan rate based on where I drive. Then I want the local cops to pull me over randomly based on where they think I should be driving.
Gee the possibilities are endless.
The potential abuse in the system is a non-issue, because it's not related to the toll verification issue. Anyone can set a camera to photograph the street and use the information gathered for any legal purpose. They can use the information for illegal purposes as well.
To follow an example cited above in this thread, you can follow someone who exits from a brothel to his home and blackmail him. Yes, that would be illegal. Using information from the toll verification system in a way that violates the law would also be illegal.
In the end, one gets to the same argument used by people who defend gun ownership rights ("Second Ammendment" in Gringo language): the potential for abuse is not enough reason to make something illegal. If it were so, kitchen knives should be illegal.
Thanks to the huge number of Gatsos, Britain already suffers from a large number of cloners, who install plates copied from another car on their own, so that fines are sent to the owner of the original car, not to them; we also have large numbers of cars where the owner didn't change the registration when they bought it, which are probably also uninsured, and again meaning that the fines from cameras go to the previous owner. I've heard that it's not unknown for some of these people to get a dozen or more speeding tickets in a day as a result.
So, even if you don't drive in London, don't be surprised when bills start turning up in your letter box.
How is this privacy infringement? Driving is not a right, it is a priveledge. If they have a toll road they have the right to make sure the toll gets paid. If you do not like the manner in which they do it, DONT USE THE ROAD!
Great Linux Site
"ice" is a noun. Unless you watch too many Mafia films.
"is" is a verb. Unless someone means Information Systems.
So you can easily remember whether it is licence or license.
Ugh. I really hate folks who are anti-driving. Its like what part of "public transportation is not for everyone" do you not understand? Not everyone likes to wait for busses and trains to arrive just to get on a packed vehicle next to a smelly passenger on a ride that will take 10 stops to get to where they wish to go.
I live in Boston, which has the oldest underground system in the US, and somehow the civic engineers were able to adapt to this brand new invention called the AUTOMOBILE and design roads, streets and highways appropriately to handle the amount of traffic we have today. I don't see why this was not done or could not be done to London. Its not like London is a city of immense size carrying 100 million citizens.
I think the main problem is certain European elites simply do not want to admit that not everyone is as enamored with public transit as they are. With Asian and European car sales on the rise for the past decade you'd think they'd get the message. Apparently not.....
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
..is that we in the UK already get ripped off so much to drive cars. The tax on petrol is astronomical, and we also pay road tax just to keep our cars on the road - my road tax, for example, is around £180 a year ($240 ish) - I will say nothing of our insurance prices which are pretty huge.
Then some how the government blames us for congesting the cities and we have to pay out for it again. I think they need to look at that they are doing, or where they are trying to go. IMHO its a real shambles at the moment.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
But then I thought about that when I bought the house :-)
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
As for the land being public, I agree that no one should be allowed to keep other citizens to use public land. So, when you fill the roads with your barely moving cars, you are keeping me from exerting my rights. Or do you think you can fill the public road with any of your junk?
London isn't the only place in the UK they are considering such a scheme. They are talking about the exact same thing for Edinburgh. The cost will be less (£2 per day I think), but it's the same idea of using cameras rather than setting up toll points.
Points:
How about mounting license cameras on taxi cabs? They run all day, and would cover ground that normal, mounted cameras wouldn't.
If you consider an alternate use, this technology could be ground-breaking in beating crime. Say you have these cameras mounted on taxi cabs and police cars. They would get a list of licence plates for stolen cars, and would continually monitor all license plates that are seen. The list would be maintained on whenever someone would file a stolen car report. I really don't see how that would violate my privacy - no alarm would go off unless I had reported my car as stolen, and I would be very interested in having it intercepted before it was shipped to Eastern Europe and sold for bargain price to the local mob connection.
On the other hand, the London proposal is worse. You are assumed guilty until you prove yourself innocent (listed as a paying driver). Still, consider the alternatives. More traffic means more deaths and more sickness. The big question is then "is it worth it?". Well, is it?
Stop the brainwash
While it does require human beings to actually go out and do the enforcement, this can be compensated by adjusting the fine. Make the fine stiff enough, and the ability to maybe get away with it doesn't overcome the times you might get caught.
will be $120/day for the truck along with a $15k deposit....:)
What's the point of paying a gasoline tax if they're (in any country) just going to charge tolls on top of the tax? Am I missing something? I've never liked the idea of tolls.
It's redundant and hostile to freedom of movement. Tolls are hardly comparable to Gestapo style road blocks, but it seems silly to charge for a service one has already paid for at the pump.
yes, there is a complete infrastructure with underground, overground train, bus, tram and light rail etc.
.. as such it is crumbling away by the day. It's all very deep and cost an arm an a leg to dig.
But, and it's a big but, it's very old, like a lot of the tube was put in in the 19th century and through the early 20th
So no easy solutions except long term, no short payback investment etc.
As other posters have pointed out, if you have a car, the government has all your details on file. If you buy fuel with a credit or debit card, that is on file, also.
Think about this... In the USA, the police generally do NOT need a search warrent to search your car. All they need to do is think that you have something going on in there. In addition, many intersections in the USA snap pictures of the cars going by to catch speeders and those running red lights. Do you think those cameras are blind the rest of the time? How about the cameras that are used to view highway conditions. In some states they run all over the highways.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
stop terrorists? Really. It might help you identify them if they just strolled about w/o any disguise (neither part seems likely). What about if they used a rented truck to deliver the bomb? You might get some pictures of the thing blowing up but that seems to be about it. What about an airplane? Even in Israel where most bombs seem to be delivered by people, it isn't the head honcho's that are strapping on the bombs. It's a (usually) young guy or girl who walks down the street with a backpack. Not some known and wanted operative that a camera utilizing facial recognition might recognize. The people organizing these little suprises aren't in the vicinity when they go off, they're in a different city, country or contienent.
I suppose that if you're dealing with people actually trying to use firearms to kill some important figure, cameras might help you see them in advance. The vogue among terrorists though, is the bomb and I fail to see how a camera would help you if they had the same sophistication that my 5 year old seems to display.
They have been doing this on toll roads in US for some time now. There is nothing new about cameras recording people who don't pay the toll.
Singapore has been using a system similar to this for around ten years now. They combine the sort of technology used for EZ-Pass in the Jersey/Pennsylvania/New York area with the camera snapshots.
When you go onto a tolled road, you pass under a gantry that checks your car for an electronic pass using a kind of card-reader (you would install a card-holder above your dashboard if you chose to do this). If it doesn't find an electronic pass, a camera a little ways down the road takes a picture of the front of your car. This would show both the license plate (required to be on the front as well as the back of the car) and your front windshield. If your front windshield shows a paper one-day or one-week toll pass, then nothing happens. If it doesn't, you get a ticket in the mail. It seems to work pretty well, and it's run by the government.
Of course, Singapore is not known for being the least controlling government in the world...
Public Transportation in the USA: Clean, Reliable, Affordable. Choose None.
Hee hee...
Driving a motor-car is certainly not a right, but a mere privilege. And when one of the conditions of the privilege is that the proper fees for road upkeep are paid, there is no reason why any reasonable means necessary be employed to do so shall be met with resistance, including surveillance cameras.
The point, I think, is that it's an amendment
to US Constitution. How is it applicable to
London, again?
Considered harmful.
Sounds like Minority Report, eh?. Let's assume you're a criminal and then track you and if you're not a criminal in the immediate future then wellllll......there's war on people! Get with the program and don't look too deeply into what we do with the information.
For you people who say no biggie?
1 The only people who say if you're not guilty then you have nothing to fear are the paranoids who have everything to fear from everyone else.
2 You say you claim you hope that this information and this process won't be used against you - how do you know? In the US we still have (this week) the 5th ammendment. So how would you like to have your CAR testify against you?
Simple..drive a black cab then you will not be charged and can use the bus lanes as well. Or become a privileged road user (royalty, army, or one of the other elite buggers who don't pay their way at the moment). Or do a Lady Porter and don't pay your fines until 20 million owed!!
Disguise your car as a red bus. Drive on the pavement instead. Use a boat. Drive 2 inches from each other (then only the one at the front/back pays). Get a FCUK OFF number plate to amuse the camera operators. Pay the bill in small coins and count them out one at a time. Buy a car transporter and earn a few bob.
There are night buses.
One big reason why the tube shuts down at night is because they need some time of day to fix the thing. If you catch the last tube home you will often see groups of guys wearing high-visibility overalls getting ready to fix the track... (well maybe not as often as there should be).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This is news for nerds?!
After having spent the last two weeks visiting the I-90 tollway in Chicago and a tollway near the Orlando International Airport, I can tell you that camera's have been there for quite some time and are quite obvious.
What should be MORE disturbing is the cameras that take a pic of your licence plate as you leave the Universal Studio's parking lot in Orlando.
Or maybe the camera's are just following me.
Nobody has hit upon the obvious solution to the traffic problem. Why not just charge more for parking? Using the roads is free as they are public, but parking doesnt have to be public at all. People are driving into the center of london to get somewhere in the center, and they must park somewhere. Double the parking fees. If people have to pay 5 pounds a day to park its the same as charging 5 pounds a day to drive in.
but I think the point those of us who have mentioned the "how is this related to anti-terrorism?" idea is that this would represent a sort of scope expansion for what was originally sold to the public as an anti-terrorism tool.
Cameras that were originally installed in order to "combat terrorism" are having their use expanded to fight lesser crimes, and now potentially to levy additional taxes. What we are trying to say is that there is a tendency for a government to use whatever power citizens grant it in, for lack of a better word, "creative" ways. That's why we have to be constantly on our guard against giving the government more power than is absolutely necessary for them to do what we need done for us. This is especially important here in the US after our recent exposure to terrorism.
You had a very good response later in the thread about how there isn't enough infrastructure in place to handle the additional traffic associated with people electing not to drive in, so the proposed fee really becomes an additional tax for those who have no alternative. You mentioned the cross rail project as a potential solution to part of the problem. What bothers me is that because part of the infrastructure for the proposed plan to levy fees has been paid for under different pretenses-- the cameras, computers, and people to watch them are already in place, the more reasonable solution of improving the public transportation infrastructure (something we desperately need here, too) is not competing on a level playing field because the other option has been partially funded by our fear of terrorism.
Thanks for staying with me this far if you bothered to read it all-- have a nice day.
Don't expect anything like that response time for the ambulance though.
That Americans care about their cars. Only those nutcases at the ACLU and NRA give a damn about civil liberties.
--
E_NOSIG
The 407 expressway in Toronto Canada uses a similar system to bill users of the toll highway who don't have government supplied transponders. The system simply snaps a photograph of the rear plate when at the cars entry and exit point on the highway. The system seems to work well although I have heard of people using everything from mud to complicated rigging that flips their licence plate up to avoid being billed.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Noone seems to have spotted that this scheme will cause increased congestion as people try to drive and park round the outskirts of the charging zone.
London's road network has been improved and optimised over the years for the existing traffic flows, and suddenly the traffic will want to go in different direstions to avoid the tolls, messing up the traffic light timing and priorities in the surrounding areas.
There will also be a scramble to get out of the zone before the charges start in the morning, and an extreme reluctance to enter the zone just before the end of the charging time - at 6.25 pm, you have a choice, sit still for 5 minutes or pay £5. People will crawl about to avoid reaching the charging zone before he 6.30 pm end time, making a nightmare scenario for people trying to go home by public transport and private cars alike.
I guess the effects of these issues will be far worse than the original congestion, espeically as they will move traffic problems away from the shopping and business areas inside the zone out into the residential areas just outside.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Look at the area that London covers, look at the area that Boston covers... look at the difference in population density then ask yourself this...
HOW THE HELL COULD STREET PLANNERS WHO BUILT THE STREETS OVER 1000 YEARS AGO ADAPT THEM TO CARS.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Wrong. The English do as they're told.
it seems that there are those in the
Noting your low UID, you act like this is something you've never seen before.
--
Absolutely.. poor people should not be driving..
everytime I turn my back /. sneaks another stupid story in here.
Since when is having your picture taken in *public* a violation of your privacy?
Will you stupid people just goto school, grow some logic capabilities and put some thought into it. If you are sitting in public you can hardly expect privacy.
Now as to whether the tolls are a good idea? Hell yes. I think it should be three times as much. Go take a friggin bus once in a while you damn whiny non-realistic bitches. Holy shit, you think the environment and gas supplies are endless?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
...because tax is literally and only theft. One robber is a thief. Ten robbers are thieves. A nationful of voting robbers-by-proxy are thieves, and entitled to precicely nothing.
You earned your property, keep it, by any means you can.
I recommend GoldMoney
That's fine if you're making 30 pounds an hour. It's not so good if you're the poor bloke making 3 pounds per hour, and need every pence of it to feed your family. In which case, if by circumstance you're forced to drive to work, that parking fee is 20% of your daily wages. And the new driving fee is another 20%. By then you might just as well have stayed home and gone on the dole.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Even in the US, where we think our freedom dwarfs those "wacky Europeans", we are required by state law to pretty much sign our life over to the Government to use a car. State mandated insurance, drivers licenses, and registration are 100% breaches of freedom.
I understand why car insurance exists. Too many wrecks go unpaid to the victim, and we, as a democracy decided to make it mandtory to pay. What I worry about however, is in the future. What about if Moller (www.moller.com/skycar) takes off, and we're all in computer controleld flying cars, and no ones ever closer than a few miles apart, and there's no wrecks. Will we have forgotten why we had to pay insurance int he first place? Will the Government charge us a monthly fee just to use our Skycars?
You're mistaking the population of Boston city proper (which is close to your quoted figure) with the size of the Boston metropolitan area. The metro area, which is the effective size of the city since Boston proper is landwise fairly small, is around 3 million as of 1990. Boston has been trying to correct at least some of their traffic problems with the big dig.
For comparison London has around 7 million people in the city proper and around 12 million in the metro area. Definitely more crowded, but then so is England overall so this should not be especially surprising.
While I'm all in favour of air conditioning, particularly on the 90/90* days we've had too many of already this Minnesota summer, my recollection of summers in London (yes, I used to live there, too) is that air conditioning is rarely helpful, and never necessary.
[*] Over 90F and over 90% relative humidity
--
E_NOSIG
I'm waiting for NYC to try something like this. There are tolls on the major bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, but not from Brooklyn and the Bronx. London and NYC both have good public transportation into and out of the city to the suburbs, so there is a good case to limit traffic in the heart of the city to local traffic.
Government money may be better spent on Live near your work programs, like the one here in Maryland. Baltimore City employees get up to $3000 towards buying a city home near their jobs.
Helps reduce commuter traffic and promote homeownership in our shrinking downtown tax-base.
Yup, and there's nothing really stopping me from cloning a plate from somebody I don't like and driving 150 MPH through the speed cameras -- works best if they have a similar type of car, but who wants to guess at what stage any such error checking takes place? No doubt you have to go into court to prove your innocence. Somebody earlier talked about "civil disobedience" -- the whole traffic camera idea comes tumbling down once enough people start cloning the plates of innocent people (or, if you prefer, number plates seen in the car park of the camera manufacturer). (As a side note for American readers, in the UK you have to get your number plates printed at your local auto parts store and they don't care if you really own the number. Thus forgery is trivial.)
Whenever I read about another complex taxation scheme, I like to work out some numbers. Kind of like asking a charity how much of your contribution actually does the good you have in mind, vs hiring more people to annoy you with phone calls.
Transport for London, the gov't agency responsible for the fee plan, says on their website that about 250,000 people drive into the designated area daily. Their plan is to reduce this traffic by 10-15% and generate "up to" L130 million for public transit.
Okay, if traffic drops 15%, that leaves 212,500 commuters paying the L5/day fee. With about 250 working days/year this should bring in 212,500 * L5 * 250 = L265,625,000 in revenue per year. Nice chunk of change, my dad would say. That's if everybody just pays the L5 and not the L120 fine for cheating.
So they have to take in more than L260 million to end up with L130 million in usable cash? That means every L5 fee costs more than L2.50 to collect. Is this a worthwhile way to collect taxes?
London is not the only capital city where the authorities are trying to drastically reduce the traffic by restricting access to cars. Paris city office has been scaling down streets by enlarging bus corridors (at least, this has an immediate positive impact on public transportation within the city limits). Athens, for instance, has been using alternate driving days as a measure to limit pollution caused by vehicles.
Unsurprisingly, all these cities are capitals of very centralized states. After a long history of concentrating powers of every conceivable nature (political, economic, cultural, etc...), it is no wonder so many people want or need to go there, be it by car or any other way.
The problem with people who live there, and suffer from nuisances such as terrible traffic, noise, overcrowdedness, high rents etc... is that they mostly can't seem to acknowledge the fact that these nuisances are just a fair price for extremely priviledged access to much better public and private service, not mentioning better job opportunities and higher wages than the rest of the country...
If the people living there really want less cars in their cities, then what about trying to actually make less PEOPLE want or need to go there, independently of how they travel... One good thing to try would consist in moving the capital (with ministries, ambassies, and the like) to another city. Or close a few cultural centres (museums, cinemas, etc...). Demolish a couple monuments (would keep those pesky tourist bus at large). Prevent high-profile businesses from settling in the city (and forget about tax revenues as well...). Promote the creation of highways, train lines, and all sorts of infrastructures that don't actually go through the capital (when they actually go further than its limits)... etc
Stop being selfish, and leave the rest of the country a chance to get some of your nuisances, for the price of a few privileges...
Yup, terrorist attacks have been a fact of life in European and other non-USA capitals for much much longer than 9/11. It's a shame when US media makes out global terrorism started then, I really think the US media is the US's worst enemy, so many people have negative attitudes towards the USA because of dumb statements their media (and sometimes their politicians) come out with.
But I think this emphasis on anti-terrorist measures (I refuse to use the dumbed down expression "War against Terrorism") is a very convenient way of bringing in restrictive and possibly invasive procedures and legislation. It's really important we all press for careful policing of how new laws and technologies are applied.
None of this is really surprising, is it?
Firstly, civilization has a long history of leveraging military and overall safety powers into the civil arena. Hence, all laws that are touted as being against "terrorists" and for "public safety" will be used to screw the average man out of as much money and liberty as possible.
Secondly, if you want to keep your civil rights (the most basic one being: the right to be left alone), then move out of the city. (I mean any city, not just The City -- London's nickname.) The crowding, greed, fear and loathing within urban areas have worked to destroy not only civil rights, but the attitude that we should even have said rights. Search and seizure should be quintessentially restricted, but if you ask any city cop, anything can be taken away for any reason, and they only approve. The real liberies that are expanding are within the ruling and enforcement classes. The old American patriot Ethan Allen is alleged to have said "the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the mountains", alluding to the concerns of cities and towns over the rural folk, and the mismatch thereby.
Thirdly, Britain has learned nothing from Orwell's characterizations (among others) and they are headed strongly for all the democratized tyranny that they can imagine. If the people of Britain don't revolt first, by 2025 you will have to get almost a dozen offcials to authorize your presence in London. Britain will effectively have an internal visa.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
Rights and freedoms are NOT granted by the 'state'. Rights and freedoms are recognized and secured by the 'state'.
From The Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
The government has no constitutional authority to restrict my freeedoms. Can't speak for Europe, I don't live there. I'm an American!
Correction: The Timetabled journey time by train is 3hr23mins, but would have required me arriving 30 minutes early - so the effective journey time - i.e. the amount of time lost to travelling - would be about 4 hours. (the next service takes 3hr52min and would require me to be 45minutes late for my meeting, which is just unacceptable). Of course, if I'd taken the train, I _wouldn't_ have arrived 30 minutes early, but that's the gamble you take when you take the train.
Addendum: It actually took me 1hr 42mins (I timed it, sad but true!) door-to-door to make the journey. I arrived about 15minutes early, which is around what I aimed for. Not only quicker & cheaper than the train but MUCH more convenient!
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Well folks the best i have seen so far is singapore's automagic road pricing, this entails all cars to have a smartcard device and the sensor should be fixed next to the windshield when the car passes the erp -- sensor , which is there in almost all roads , it just charges off the card.
,further since they have access to traffic flows they periodically reprice things..
Now the system is smart and deducts charges depending on the time of the day, the rush hour is more expensive than others
i think this is very smart.
In the US most all roads are subsidized by local taxes anyhow - and frankly I've seen the numbers it really isn't enough. There's an inbalance on what taxes pay for and how much the roads really cost to drive on. Sure they're public roads, but even you can't honestly say that just because they are public means they require zero upkeep - or that they can handle as much traffic as you want - or that everyone can drive to work. Most places none of that's true.
And there are people who drive into town because (and I'm quoting someone I heard on a local talk radio show) I paid for my car - it cost a lot and I like to drive it.
Clean, Reliable, Affordable. Choose None
Should be:
Clean, Reliable, Affordable, Available. Choose None.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Sure they "can". And you can be damned sure John Law will show up with something up his sleeve that will turn "can" into "sure as hell will". Like looking around the place and suggesting he sees something that "just might mean we'll have to shut you down for a couple of days to take a closer look". Any ISP without a good knowledge of his exact rights, or a lawyer on site, will be hard presses not to "can", considering the possible alternatives.
What we need are more giant parking areas with quick Central London public transport connections!
As a Londoner, I get to see the traffic problem constantly.
London traffic can be divided into four groups. The first are local residents. The second are people driving to work. The third are deliveries/essential workers, etc. The fourth are non-commercial folks going into London for shopping or recreation.
The first group live there, so we cannot remove them. Few Central London residents have cars anyway, so this is no problem.
The second group don't want to be driving around the middle of London, but feel it is their only choice because of poor public transport.
The third group are essential. Deliveries must be made, and the road network is the only system truly capable.
The fourth group drive for convenience. I am one of those people. We would rather not spend an hour on a smelly train surrounded by (mostly) grubby folk when we can sit in our air conditioned cars listening to our own music.
It's all about convenience.
There is a large out of town car park in Greenwich. It costs £4 to park there for a day. When I want to go into Central London, I park there, get on the tube at the Millennium Dome and I am in Central London within 10 minutes. It's a good idea. It keeps me off of the central london roads, and I only have to put up with public transport for 10 minutes!
What we need are more giant parking areas with quick Central London public transport connections!
I do not want to have to fight for a parking space in a tiny car park 15 miles out of town and then look forward to a one hour train journey in! They should be creating giant car parks like those at Greenwich where we can park cheaply and get into Central London within 15 minutes.
If they can't do that, many will continue to drive in, since most of us own a car BECAUSE WE DON'T *WANT* TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT. I cannot stand the people on public transport, the discomfort, and having to stand! Cut the journey times, and I'll use it for 10 minutes here and there.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The smart man in London already gives way to a BMW, because it sure as hell ain't gonna give way to you...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm probably ruining the millions I could make producing and selling this idea, but...
All Joe Citizen needs to do is put his tube card in a metal sheath when he's not near the reader. I honestly don't know the materials it would take to block the signal (and I don't know the technology behind it) but if the cloth and items of your bag can stop the transmission, a simple metal cover should do it. Shoot, you could even sell them under the guise of protecting oneself from the radiation of the thing, along with ensuring your privacy. They'd sell like hotcakes, and could be personalized or in different colors, etc., and would probably get lost all the time and people would buy more....sounds like there's a mint to be made to me, and everyone ends up happy. This way you still retain the advantage, however, of how fast the card is read (as opposed to magnetic stripe or whathaveyou) as long as people remember to take it out before they get to the entrance.
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
Messing with police cameras is considered an act of terrorism. Also they're normally well out of reach. Mess with the police and they wont react well...
> in the UK you have to get your number plates printed at your local auto parts store and they don't care if you really own the number
Not any more. Although it's very recent, the regulation of manufacturing number plates has changed quite dramatically. Funnily enough, part of the reason for the new legislation includes "The introduction of cameras for enforcement purposes means that it is more important than ever for number plates to be legible". Part of the new regulations is that manufacturers must be licenced and must identify themselves on plates that they make. (Although how the filth will identify the manufacturer of an unmarked plate is beyond me...)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
| have to pay a toll of $5
No, only 37.5% of the bridges into Manhattan charge a toll. The rest are free. I used to drive to work in Manhattan from Brooklyn every day for no toll at all- and I had four local bridges to choose from.
Exhibit one:
New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (toll) Bridges & Tunnels map
Exhibit two:
Transportation Alternatives' 5-borough bridge map
There are lots of ways into Manhattan without paying - you just have to navigate a little.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
*Yawn* Old news.
Since inception - our freeway [read:tollway] in Melbourne has had this sort of thing!
People have been snapped at ^200km going through it - yet still register the toll.
The way it works is similar in principal - except that each car must be nominated to use it by having an "e-tag", similar to a "RF-key" that is put just behind you readview mirror - if you have an e-tag and it is "topped up", you can pass through any of the gantrees and your toll is registed.
If you don't have an e-tag and are registered - you pay a $2 fine (for not having your e-tag in); if you have NO e-tag and are not registered - you are up for $AU100 fine.
The excellent part is that it takes the photo from the front - I ride a motorbike - so they cannot charge me (no plates on the front of bikes here although they are looking at legislation forcing us to put "sticker numberplates" on the front of the bike as a result)
The reason for the e-tags is because the company is a privateer - thus is not legally allowed to access the license database (read: privacy act) - therefore you must register your numberplate to use the system.
We have been told we will be paying for this system for 70 years (aparently).. initially everyone said that they were not going to use it - but now... it is VERY busy - you have a tough time getting from the airport to the city without using it!
A trip that use to take about 40-60 mins (my house to the airport) now takes 15!
There is a rumour that they can time how long you take between gantrees - and if you speed (less than the minimum time to take between gantree's) - you get booked! This would require the license database to be bound of course.. the way they are cracking down on speeding nowdays (we have some of the most ingenious speed cameras in the world) - I wouldn't be surprised if it occured!
more info: http://www.transurban.com.au
Just don't pollute me and my friends. If you don't smoke in my restaurant, please don't drive your car down my street.
"I hope someone mugs you for saying that, and the police don't come out to help because you didn't want to pay them."
In a free country I'd have shot the mugger with my privately owned handgun. Or he'd have never attacked, because he knows most folks carry guns as a point of pride in self reliance. Or, the rentacops who I and the other residents of my street had willingly paid would have turned him away before he ever got here. And if I hadn't paid the rentacops, probably like doctors they'd save me first and work out a payment plan with me after.
The reality of the government police: they aren't there to save you, they're there to rule you. Sure they'll try and save you if they're on the spot. I'm not saying they're not nice people. But mostly they'll arrive too late to do anything but clean up the mess and try (not always very hard) to catch the culprit.
>And I pay the government a *lot* of money for the priviledge of driving on it. You may pay the government but you don't compensate for the ill-health and deaths due to pollution. See, for example, The Independent's story I would suggest there is a market for a healthy environment for our children.
>And I pay the government a *lot* of money for the priviledge of driving on it. You may pay the government but you don't compensate for the ill-health and deaths due to pollution. See, for example, The Independent's story I suggest there is a market for a healthy environment for our children. >And I pay the government a *lot* of money for the priviledge of driving on it.
You may pay the government but you don't compensate for the ill-health and deaths due to pollution. See, for example, The Independent's story Asthma in children: the damning new evidence we cannot ignore
I suggest there is a market for a healthy environment for our children.
>And I pay the government a *lot* of money for the privilege of driving on it.
You may pay the government but you don't compensate for the ill-health and deaths due to pollution. See, for example, The Independent's story Asthma in children: the damning new evidence we cannot ignore
I suggest there is a market for a healthy environment for our
I haven't seen mentioned yet that is it a proven fact that traffic lights have been slown down or mistimed to congest traffic. It is said that Livingstone will make the timings on the traffic lights drastically improve once these tolls come into force, to give an instant effect that he was "right". - DDRP
I shall have to assume you're a collonial by your term "parking lot", as such you can't comprehend why tax is hated, the reason is that tax in this country is just about to destroy all morale, it's all going to the dogs and one can earn a far better wage by not being honest now. Whoever said crime didn't pay was a fool, this government exists to help the criminal and rape the honest man. - DDRP
Taxi Drivers
Delivery Drivers
Moving Home
Stupid
So, intelligent, right thinking people have nothing to fear.
In fact, there are already so many reasons to not drive (or even own a car) in London, that the negligable decrease in privacy makes very little difference.
If this analogy was true, wouldn't the car manufacturers be Microsoft? Oh...wait...
[insert witty comment here]