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:Whats the point of being anti-car?

[Spudley]

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.