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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.
"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.
No, what we really need is two lcds, each one covering half the plate, and they cycle which is on and which is off a few hundred times a second. With some careful timing, cops wouldn't notice, but cameras couldn't get more than half the plate at once... no plate, no ticket ;-)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Here in Germany, there have been cameras for traffic violations for a long time (at least en years). The system sounds similar to what is going on in London, but for a different purpose. In Germany, they are typically used for speeding violations or for running red lights. Technologically quite primitive, too. Just place a sensor in the road (or two if you need to measure speed), snap a photo of the driver and the license plate, and send the summons to the vehicle's owner.
In cases where the owner is the person driving the car, this does not seem like too much of a problem -- you know when you've been caught and you expect the summons in the mail (the flash is so bright, you can't mistake it, even in full sunlight, which is all-too-rare in Germany).
The problem arises when the car's owner and the person caught violation traffic laws are not the same. In Germany, the vehicle's owner is responsible for either identifying the individual in the photo or paying the fine, which to me shifts the burden of law enforcement from the state to the individual. Why should I accept this responsibility? It is the responsibiltiy of the police to figure who committed a crime, however minor, and not force me to choose between paying a fine or identifying the culprit -- assuming that I know who the person is.
I wonder how the British system is going to handle this?
In Finland, if anyone sees your license plate number (e.g. if you drive on the road), they have the right to find out who you are and the municipality in which you live. All you have to do is call the registration center, and they'll tell you who owns whichever license plate you read off to them. But hold on, it gets better.
Finland's largest mobile operator, Sonera, has linked into the registration database and now offers you a service, whereby you send a text message to number 16400, with the body of the message reading FIND AUTO XYZ-123 (the license plate number), and it returns a text message containing the owner of the car's information. Hold on, it gets even better.
After getting their name, you can turn around and use the same service to get their mobile phone number. Just send and SMS to 16400, with the body of the message reading FIND HARRI HIRVI (or whatever his/her name is) and it'll return and SMS to you with their mobile phone number.
Needless to say, there's just a *wee bit* of potential for abuse with this system. Like, some old pervert sees young chick driving, calls her up on her mobile phone and says "I'm watching you" or some crap, and follows her home. Or you cut someone off in traffic and they decide to find out who you are and harass you for the next ten years. Or something.
Fortunately, though, I haven't yet heard any real horror stories of this kind of abuse.
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
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.
No... don't steal a car :) Just get a set of licence plates made to match a car identical to your car and use those. If you drive a stolen car in London you will get stopped very quickly but it will take years for some poor guy to prove it wasn't him ...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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
London really wasn't designed with traffic in mind.... in fact, I'm not sure that London was designed at all. Here's a story for you: In the 1660's, after the Great Fire of London, the authorities tried to use the ensuing chaos as a way to rebuild London with wider streets. But landowners refused to let them do it - no-one was prepared to give an inch of their property, (despite the fact that the fire was only possible because the buildings were too close together), and the result is that we're left with a road system that was inadequate five hundred years ago, let alone with today traffic. You really don't know what traffic chaos is until you've seen London on a bad day. (Boston is a country field by comparison)
I accept that some people need to use cars, and I also accept that the public transport system is awful in some places, but the bottom line is that something has to be done, because the whole system is grinding to a halt.
I don't have any problem with this charge, and frankly, if they don't use cameras, there really isn't any other viable way to do it - can you imagine everyone in London stopping at a toll booth??
There are some major problems with the scheme, but I don't think the method do doing it is one of them.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
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...
*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