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.

Comments

Re:Less of the terrorism nonsense

[mccalli]

Believe me, folks, it's point is to make people think twice about driving in.

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