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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.
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 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).
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