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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"?
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
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.
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No, 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
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!
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...
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.
....but that (LCD gizmo to make the plate invisble to cameras) would be tax evasion, which is criminal, and rightly so. Why is this suggestion moderated up? Hey, Microsoft charge $250 for XP - if only I had some heavy mates, then we could smash our way into the warehouse and steal as many copies as we want, 'eh?
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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
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"
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 :)
You can't significantly improve the car supporting infrastructure of London without some major structural work i.e. knocking down large numbers of buildings to make way for new roads. If you do that, the volume of traffic will increase until you are back where you started.
The public transport system in London is probably the most widely used in the UK because for many people, driving in London is a nightmare they'd rather not think about. If it became easier, everybody would jump straight back in the cars and hit town, particularly as the public transport system is mostly in a poor state of repair.
While I think there are serious problems with the proposed scheme, the answer is definitely not "build more roads"
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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.