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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.
"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
The answer is to dismantle London. Why do we need it? Technology means there is no longer a need to gather huge numbers of people together in big buildings for them to cooperate. And there is nothing useful or productive in Central London that requires large manufacturing sites. The reason for the dominance of London is all those civil servants living in houses with vastly inflated prices and hoping to retire, sell them and get rich. Making travel INTO London more expensive will benefit those house prices still further. It's classical monopoly economics, as explained by Karl Marx.
Even the planning system colludes, preventing the building of houses in surrounding areas to drive prices up still further.
But of course, the Mayor's position depends on all this continuing to work. If prices fall or London starts to be sidelined, he'll be out. So: devise a scheme to make living in Central London even more attractive. And don't worry about the folks having enough money to live there. It's your and my pension schemes they're raping to pay their bonuses.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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
No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.
Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.
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!
In NYC, there is a trend of banks like Goldman's moving to New Jersey, and Warburg's moved up to Stamford, but it's all still within close proximity to Manhattan. Technology has not advanced to the point where location is irrelevant if your business has to interact in any non-trivial way with another business. That's why there's a Silicon Valley, too.
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!)
Really, the problem is that Ken Livingstone hates cars, always has. A classical socialist, he thinks all transport should be public, and that taxation is the solution to every problem. There's only one feasible solution, and that's that the national government must hypothecate road fund tax for transport exclusively, rather than adding it to the general pot of taxation (and while I'm on the subject, do the same for NI).
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..
Karma whoring time I guess ;-)
They don't bill you; you pay in advance.
Basically you go into a shop, give them your £5 and your registration number, and say "I'm going into London next Tuesday". Next Tuesday, if the cameras snap you, they consult the database and if you're there, fine; if not they pull your address from DVLA (UK version of the DMV for our American cousins) and fine £80 you in the same way they do people who get caught by speed cameras (post you a bill). (£40 fine if you pay up immediately)
You'll also be able to order on-line, on the phone, or by post.
It applys only 7.00am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday, and various people are exempt; taxis, ambulances, the army, motorcycles, disabled drivers, buses, coaches, tow trucks, electric or gas cars. You get a hefty discount if you live in the congestion zone, although you still have to pay some of it.
As a side note, the posts for the cameras are already going up and damn they are big and ugly.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Yes, I find driving into the centre to be pointless. I work in London, but live about twenty miles west in Marlow and what I do is drive to the outskirts and get the Tube the rest of the way in.
I used to have to go near where you describe - I worked at Chase near Southwark bridge, about a five minute walk away. Now my journey is actually longer, and I have to get out to Canary Wharf. And this is my problem with the idea.
You see, my daily experience shows that the Tube can't cope with the existing numbers of passengers, let alone all the ex-drivers that they're trying to encourage down there. Basically, there's no public infrastructure capable of taking the extra burden caused by people dumping their cars in the centre.
That's the annoyance - because no alternative has been put in place, the whole thing essentially plays out as just being another tax. People who have to drive will still have to drive, because the alternatives are swamped already.
Bring on the crossrail project, that's what I say. Charge after that's in place (a virtually-non-stopping east/west link across the city, for those not familiar with the idea), rather than just punitively before anyone can do anything about it.
Cheers,
Ian
£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.
Got to agree with Mr. Chunder on this one. I don't know if the US has speed cameras, but we in the rest of the UK are plagued with them. Same idea, but they take a snap of the back of your car as you drive by at whatever speed it is above the limit they are set to. A few weeks later, you get a photo in the post, and a speeding ticket. There are ways to appeal this, however.
The UK has fairly strict privacy laws, and is a signatory to the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) - they wouldn't be able to do photograph your car if it violated the privacy of the individual. Interestingly enough, they can't take a photo of the car from the front for privacy reasons - never mind the fact that having a camera flash going off in your face would render you unable to drive safely for at least a few seconds.
HTH,
Alan.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
> everyone has to pay some kind of raod tax to drive a car
Not if the vehicle does less than 8 miles a year on the public highway.
Not if the vehicle is over a certain age (ISTR it's 25 years, but may be wrong)
Not if the vehicle is a certain class of invalid carriage.
So no, not everyone has to pay some kind of road tax to drive a car.
> you dont have cameras all over the place scanning plates for that
Actually, they do. There are several systems in use by the police in the UK which scan registration plates as they pass and then cross-index with the PNC and licencing computers and alert the tax collectors (sorry, "Police Officers") to vehicles which are not taxed (amongst other things). That's one of the reasons why the legislation was recently changed to require a specific font for the number plate.
> most lawabiding citizens wont try to get away without paying if they have to show a permit in their window
Uhh...by definition, that should read "all lawabiding". If they're lawabiding they're not going to break the law. And lawabiding citizens are going to pay the road fund licence regardless of the presence of a permit or not (since, if they don't pay they cease to be lawabiding), On the other hand, there are plenty of people out there who drive untaxed/unmot'd/uninsured vehicles on British roads - I know, one of them drove into the back of my car when I was stationary earlier in the year. I estimate the direct cost to me to be in excess of £6000 _so far_. (I lost my NCB, I lost my policy excess, I lost use of my vehicle whilst it was being repaired etc. etc.) But then again, he wasn't a "lawabiding" citizen. And he did have a tax disc - it just wasn't valid (at least, not for the vehicle he was driving).
> allot of f*cking money.
Well, at least they'd be able to claim that some of the revenue raised from motorists was being spent on "transport" for a change...
> Issuing peices of paper and those little plastic sleave things to put them in - f*cking jack.
As I've already pointed out, there really isn't a need to issue the disc (since the final arbiter of whether your vehicle is taxed or not is the DVLAs computer records, not the presence or otherwise of a tax disc).
Of course, failure to display that disc is an offence seperate from failing to tax the vehicle, so it is another way of raising revenue from motorists.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
You're right. Public transport in the UK is a bad joke. And succesive UK governments have tried to use a "carrot & stick" approach to get motorists out of their cars and into public transport - only they always forget the carrot.
Here's an example of how bad the system is. I live about 1/2 a mile from a train station. Later this afternoon I have to attend a meeting in London - the building I will be visiting is literally right above an underground station (for anybody who's in the area, it's the BSI building in Chiswick High St - which is on top of Gunnersby tube station)
Estimated time to drive: 1hr 45mins (depending on traffic, it can take as long as 2hr 15 - but not this time of day)
Estimated time by train: 3hr 20mins (according to the timetable - last time I did the same journey it was almost 5 hours).
Oh, and even though my car isn't particularly frugal (maybe 20-22mpg) It's still way cheaper for me to drive than catch the train.
*IF* we had cheap, reliable, punctual safe public transport I'd use it. But whilst railway companies are increasing prices and killing passengers I'll stick with my car - even with fuel at £4 a gallon
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> only the Police and Military have access to that at the moment
You really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
> The underground is overcrowded and badly run,
Yes, but if you think that's bad go live somewhere like Birmingham for six months. Sad fact of it is that the London Undergound is one of the best mass-transit systems in the UK. (Scary, I know!)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> The bill is sent to the owner of the car
Actually, no. It's sent to "the registered keeper" which may or may not be the owner. There is no centralised registery of ownership in the UK.
> 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).
The reason you can't find a link is because this defence has not, in fact, been upheld. Indeed, a magistrate's court cannot aquit based on this (due to a decision in a higher court). There is, however, a possibility that you may _at a later date_ be able to get such a conviction overturned. Try Association of British Drivers for more info on this. It turns out that if the registered keeper fails to provide the requested information, they can get prosecuted for the offence anyway.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
having a camera flash going off in your face would render you unable to drive safely for at least a few seconds.
Since when have speed cameras been about safety? Its not like they're in front of schools. They are revenue raisers to pay for donuts, and thats about it.
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.
It already costs £1 for 20 minutes parking in some parts of central London, and this doesn't deter people - quite the opposite, a lot of the motorists you see driving slowly and clogging up the roads are just cruising for an empty parking place.
The problem is that London does not have a good ring-road that lets people drive from one side to the other. This cross town traffic would be unaffected by parking fee increases in the centre.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
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