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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"?
"shutter" device that fits on top of license plate, and can "open" and "close"... controllable from inside the car. Simply "close" the shutter" to prevent picture of license plate from being snapped. :-) Open it immediately thereafter so that cops don't nail you for driving without plates.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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
"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.
except most of the possible solutions are privacy-invasive in one way or another.
Here in the UK, a variety of new laws have made protection of privacy paramount in almost all private and commercial transactions. Pretty well the only exceptions allowable are those that the government has allowed itself.
There are currently new rules being made which allow almost any government department, QUANGO, or local council to overrule the privacy laws for almost any reason.
Big Brother rules OK!
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.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You should look at it again they spell it "liscence".
Moron.
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
Many toll booths have a membership option - allowing regular users to faststream through a set of lanes by simply swiping a card or having a barcode on their dash read.
All this does is extend this to ALL traffic.
The only problem as I see it is that I can be being charged for a service without having it made clear to me that I am going to have to pay.
The usual IANAL,
but my understanding of how it is in America,
is that all of your rights and freedoms are granted to you by the state (I don't mean like in the 50 states of the US, I mean the more abstract "state") and as such they have the right to restrict your freedoms to a degree.
Yes, the bill of rights grants the freedom to move, but not to tresspass. This is the same logic that puts the FCC in charge of the "air" and its bandwith spectrum.
Now, on to your public transpo comment:
unless you get to an underground station (I must admit I don't know much about London public transpo) you still have to use the roads (from what I understand you wouldn't want to use the rails!) and if there is more traffic the public transpo bus is bottlenecked by all the damn cars!
So if you reduce the number of cars on the road, you improve the efficiency of buses, thus making them a more attractive alternative. You have to boot-strap somehow!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Oh, sorry, misread. I thought the headline said "Cameras in UK for Troll Enforcement".
Bummer
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
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!
fuck it, what you need is this.
c-hack.com |
Is Civil Disobedience permitted in the UK?
:-)
By its very definition, no, it is not permitted. If it were, it wouldn't be disobedience
I don't know what you'd be charged with, but you can bet you'd be charged with something. Consider this - if I came to your house each day, and taped newspaper over your windows, you'd have me arrested, right? Same principle - I'd be (temporarily) denying the owner of something the use of it. It would also cost them money to have someone remove the tape, and you can bet they'd want to recover that plus punitive damages. Finally, if I had to enter/climb onto any private property in order to reach the camera, you'd almost certainly be looking at a trespass charge.
So no, they can't charge you with destroying the cameras, but they'd find something to charge you with.
That's not to say I don't think it's a good idea, just don't go doing it assuming that you'll get nothing more than a chuckle and a shake of the head from the police.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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...
"Above all we need to have a proper public transport infrastructure before a congestion charging scheme can be introduced"
I thought London had a developed underground railway and train network? Pardon my ignorance, I've never been there - can anyone comment on what this comment meant?
--jquirke
The least they could do is insert a (sic) next to a missplet[sic] word
Ah, the irony of a spelling mistake in a post complaining about spelling mistakes...
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yeah and remember all those problems they had with the "eTag" transponders that resulted in the freeway been free for several extra months?
--jquirke
You could be charged with either criminal damage or obstruction of the police.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There will be discounts for residents and exemptions for certain professions.
If I was London right now, I'd join a union.
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.
except most of the possible solutions are privacy-invasive in one way or another.
So, what DO we have number plates for exactly? I thought it was to identify cars. How is taking a picture of you driving around in a public place an invasion of privacy? Oh, i know, im not allowed to know waht ure doing!! Well guess what, these people dont care WHAT you are doing, no matter how many conspiracy theories you put together. All they are interested in is finding nonpayers, same as the police are interested in finding speeding moterists with speed cameras.
Here in the UK, among motorists there is a growing feeling of being "picked on" by the police or government. We have traffic problems all over the place, and one of the governments manifestoes was to get people off the roads in private transportation, and onto public transportation. They are not doing this by improving public transportation, but by making it easier to penalise the motorist. Guess why? Cause theres so many motorists, a lot of them are bound to either speed, travel in bus lanes, or go places without paying tolls. And what can u get off these people? yep, fines. And that means more money to the government.
Schemes like this are not designed to reduce the number of cars as a primary concern, they are there as a money making revenue for the UK government. Oh, and considering their recent RIP bill and stuff, i wouldnt worry about privacy, its already taken care of..
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.
Karma whoring time I guess ;-)
They don't bill you; you pay in advance.
Basically you go into a shop, give them your £5 and your registration number, and say "I'm going into London next Tuesday". Next Tuesday, if the cameras snap you, they consult the database and if you're there, fine; if not they pull your address from DVLA (UK version of the DMV for our American cousins) and fine £80 you in the same way they do people who get caught by speed cameras (post you a bill). (£40 fine if you pay up immediately)
You'll also be able to order on-line, on the phone, or by post.
It applys only 7.00am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday, and various people are exempt; taxis, ambulances, the army, motorcycles, disabled drivers, buses, coaches, tow trucks, electric or gas cars. You get a hefty discount if you live in the congestion zone, although you still have to pay some of it.
As a side note, the posts for the cameras are already going up and damn they are big and ugly.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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.
You mean public service workers in London are forced to take large packages with them to work every day? That is tough. I suppose they have to carry large wooden crosses on their backs all day too, right :-)?
Seriously, most of the people who drive downtown do so because they'd rather jump from their doorsteps straight into their comfy cars and listen to music while stuck in traffice, than have to sit/stand on public transit with the unwashed masses. If you think all those people clogging the roads are lugging around large parcels then you're living in a different world.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Gosh, I wish private firearms were legal over here. Then we could resist the state's endless desire to control our lives, like you lucky people in the USA.
On a more serious note... *shrug* who cares? Cars are a menace, anything that discourages their use is a good thing in my book. (Hope that doesn't sound like a troll; it really is what I think.) Civil liberties angle? Pffft, this is the country where you can be jailed for five years for losing your PGP provate key, and the same again for telling third parties that the Govt. has seized your keys (and thus encrypted communication is compromised.) There are five CCTV cameras between me and my local pub. But I haven't been mugged (or in deed a victim of any crime) in 7 years in Brixton, supposedly the crime centre of the London inner city according to the Daily Fascis^h^h Mail.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
No, quite the opposite.
The idea is to clear out the private traffic to make the roads better for commercial traffic. This will _encourage_ business to stay in central London rather than moving out to the suburbs. This is a _good_ thing.
It will, you are right, make life easier for the rich - since the rich in London travel via taxi (not Roller or Bentley...). It will of course make life easier for the poor to, who travel by bus.
The only large group of people who will suffer, are the very lazy, and the kids who like to cruise around in cars thumping out the music and whistling at girls.
Sounds good to me.
-----
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
In lots of other cities in the UK, issue with London is that there are people so stupid that they will still insist on driving their cars in rather than mixing with the "masses" on public transport.
Personally I look on this as a tax on the rich who refuse to ride on public transport. Now if they only had decent cycle lanes for bikes and bladers I'd miss out on the tube section of my journey.
As a reference for our US cousins, it takes in rush hour around 20 mins to go from the 'burbs into the centre if you take the tube, it takes around an hour if you drive.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The number plate is "owned" by the DVLA, while you can buy it and have "ownership" at the end of the day the DVLA can revoke it so it ceases to become valid, and travelling with an invalid number is illegal.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
£165 a year to tax my car. £8 on every £10 of fuel I buy goes to the government. Huge speeding tax fines. Forced expensive insurance. Residential parking tax... And now they want me to pay to drive into London. This makes me very angry. I know it will spread to my town if it is sucessful.
It also makes me angry when I see the government introducing this before upgrading the underground tube and the bus system.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
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"
> everyone has to pay some kind of raod tax to drive a car
Not if the vehicle does less than 8 miles a year on the public highway.
Not if the vehicle is over a certain age (ISTR it's 25 years, but may be wrong)
Not if the vehicle is a certain class of invalid carriage.
So no, not everyone has to pay some kind of road tax to drive a car.
> you dont have cameras all over the place scanning plates for that
Actually, they do. There are several systems in use by the police in the UK which scan registration plates as they pass and then cross-index with the PNC and licencing computers and alert the tax collectors (sorry, "Police Officers") to vehicles which are not taxed (amongst other things). That's one of the reasons why the legislation was recently changed to require a specific font for the number plate.
> most lawabiding citizens wont try to get away without paying if they have to show a permit in their window
Uhh...by definition, that should read "all lawabiding". If they're lawabiding they're not going to break the law. And lawabiding citizens are going to pay the road fund licence regardless of the presence of a permit or not (since, if they don't pay they cease to be lawabiding), On the other hand, there are plenty of people out there who drive untaxed/unmot'd/uninsured vehicles on British roads - I know, one of them drove into the back of my car when I was stationary earlier in the year. I estimate the direct cost to me to be in excess of £6000 _so far_. (I lost my NCB, I lost my policy excess, I lost use of my vehicle whilst it was being repaired etc. etc.) But then again, he wasn't a "lawabiding" citizen. And he did have a tax disc - it just wasn't valid (at least, not for the vehicle he was driving).
> allot of f*cking money.
Well, at least they'd be able to claim that some of the revenue raised from motorists was being spent on "transport" for a change...
> Issuing peices of paper and those little plastic sleave things to put them in - f*cking jack.
As I've already pointed out, there really isn't a need to issue the disc (since the final arbiter of whether your vehicle is taxed or not is the DVLAs computer records, not the presence or otherwise of a tax disc).
Of course, failure to display that disc is an offence seperate from failing to tax the vehicle, so it is another way of raising revenue from motorists.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
You're right. Public transport in the UK is a bad joke. And succesive UK governments have tried to use a "carrot & stick" approach to get motorists out of their cars and into public transport - only they always forget the carrot.
Here's an example of how bad the system is. I live about 1/2 a mile from a train station. Later this afternoon I have to attend a meeting in London - the building I will be visiting is literally right above an underground station (for anybody who's in the area, it's the BSI building in Chiswick High St - which is on top of Gunnersby tube station)
Estimated time to drive: 1hr 45mins (depending on traffic, it can take as long as 2hr 15 - but not this time of day)
Estimated time by train: 3hr 20mins (according to the timetable - last time I did the same journey it was almost 5 hours).
Oh, and even though my car isn't particularly frugal (maybe 20-22mpg) It's still way cheaper for me to drive than catch the train.
*IF* we had cheap, reliable, punctual safe public transport I'd use it. But whilst railway companies are increasing prices and killing passengers I'll stick with my car - even with fuel at £4 a gallon
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
How are they going to tell the differance between people who live in london and don't own a car and but have borrowed one to driver OUT OF LONDON for the day/ever!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
> only the Police and Military have access to that at the moment
You really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
> The underground is overcrowded and badly run,
Yes, but if you think that's bad go live somewhere like Birmingham for six months. Sad fact of it is that the London Undergound is one of the best mass-transit systems in the UK. (Scary, I know!)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
To pull a little sense out of that nonsense...
If 20 bicyclists get hit by cars and die in london every year.. I have a question. How many car drivers get hit by other cars and killed in london every year?
they've been doing the same thing in Oklahoma on thier turnpike system for 5 years now. Several cities are also doing this for red light runners.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
- 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 :)
Yeah and then I want them to sell the information to my insurance company who can then jack my premiums based solely on where I drove, maybe only once. Then I want my bank to play with the car loan rate based on where I drive. Then I want the local cops to pull me over randomly based on where they think I should be driving.
Gee the possibilities are endless.
The potential abuse in the system is a non-issue, because it's not related to the toll verification issue. Anyone can set a camera to photograph the street and use the information gathered for any legal purpose. They can use the information for illegal purposes as well.
To follow an example cited above in this thread, you can follow someone who exits from a brothel to his home and blackmail him. Yes, that would be illegal. Using information from the toll verification system in a way that violates the law would also be illegal.
In the end, one gets to the same argument used by people who defend gun ownership rights ("Second Ammendment" in Gringo language): the potential for abuse is not enough reason to make something illegal. If it were so, kitchen knives should be illegal.
Thanks to the huge number of Gatsos, Britain already suffers from a large number of cloners, who install plates copied from another car on their own, so that fines are sent to the owner of the original car, not to them; we also have large numbers of cars where the owner didn't change the registration when they bought it, which are probably also uninsured, and again meaning that the fines from cameras go to the previous owner. I've heard that it's not unknown for some of these people to get a dozen or more speeding tickets in a day as a result.
So, even if you don't drive in London, don't be surprised when bills start turning up in your letter box.
..is that we in the UK already get ripped off so much to drive cars. The tax on petrol is astronomical, and we also pay road tax just to keep our cars on the road - my road tax, for example, is around £180 a year ($240 ish) - I will say nothing of our insurance prices which are pretty huge.
Then some how the government blames us for congesting the cities and we have to pay out for it again. I think they need to look at that they are doing, or where they are trying to go. IMHO its a real shambles at the moment.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
But then I thought about that when I bought the house :-)
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
As for the land being public, I agree that no one should be allowed to keep other citizens to use public land. So, when you fill the roads with your barely moving cars, you are keeping me from exerting my rights. Or do you think you can fill the public road with any of your junk?
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
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
While it does require human beings to actually go out and do the enforcement, this can be compensated by adjusting the fine. Make the fine stiff enough, and the ability to maybe get away with it doesn't overcome the times you might get caught.
They create a false sense of security. People tend to think that there is someone always watching that particular camera and that as soon as something bad will happen it will only be a matter of seconds before authority shows up to club the perp over the head. Can you say fantasy world? Quite often crimes happen undetected even with the cameras. People find clever ways to avoid them. I still say that more people should be able to carry handguns. No better deterant than not knowing if that person will poke holes in you if try to take their wallet. Camera vs. .45ACP. hmm.
No, you don't have to cover the cost of the vehicle - that's what insurance is for. You need to cover the maximum rental fee and perhaps an insurance deductable.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
stop terrorists? Really. It might help you identify them if they just strolled about w/o any disguise (neither part seems likely). What about if they used a rented truck to deliver the bomb? You might get some pictures of the thing blowing up but that seems to be about it. What about an airplane? Even in Israel where most bombs seem to be delivered by people, it isn't the head honcho's that are strapping on the bombs. It's a (usually) young guy or girl who walks down the street with a backpack. Not some known and wanted operative that a camera utilizing facial recognition might recognize. The people organizing these little suprises aren't in the vicinity when they go off, they're in a different city, country or contienent.
I suppose that if you're dealing with people actually trying to use firearms to kill some important figure, cameras might help you see them in advance. The vogue among terrorists though, is the bomb and I fail to see how a camera would help you if they had the same sophistication that my 5 year old seems to display.
Public Transportation in the USA: Clean, Reliable, Affordable. Choose None.
Driving a motor-car is certainly not a right, but a mere privilege. And when one of the conditions of the privilege is that the proper fees for road upkeep are paid, there is no reason why any reasonable means necessary be employed to do so shall be met with resistance, including surveillance cameras.
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!)
How many cities in the World have 100 million citizens? For the record, London had a population of about 7 million in 1996. The best figure I could get for Boston was 558,000 in 1998 (can you say "order of magnitude"?).
The last major remodelling of London happened in the late 17th century after a significant proportion of it burned down in the Great Fire at which time a) Boston was probably a handful of log cabins, b) the concept of the modern motor car was still three hundred years in the future. Unfortunately, Christopher Wren's idea for a rationally planned London was thwarted because the population wanted to put their houses and shops back where they were before.
London is a city that has been growing in an unplanned haphazard way for nearly 2,000 years. A lot of its road transport problems can be traced to the road system which still more or less follows the mediaval plan. Check out a street map of London to see what I mean. There's none of these nice square grids that most US cities are based on.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Nobody has hit upon the obvious solution to the traffic problem. Why not just charge more for parking? Using the roads is free as they are public, but parking doesnt have to be public at all. People are driving into the center of london to get somewhere in the center, and they must park somewhere. Double the parking fees. If people have to pay 5 pounds a day to park its the same as charging 5 pounds a day to drive in.
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.
That Americans care about their cars. Only those nutcases at the ACLU and NRA give a damn about civil liberties.
--
E_NOSIG
I think think insurance would be astronomically higher if you give people that much incentive to run off with the rental car, don't you?
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
The 407 expressway in Toronto Canada uses a similar system to bill users of the toll highway who don't have government supplied transponders. The system simply snaps a photograph of the rear plate when at the cars entry and exit point on the highway. The system seems to work well although I have heard of people using everything from mud to complicated rigging that flips their licence plate up to avoid being billed.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Noone seems to have spotted that this scheme will cause increased congestion as people try to drive and park round the outskirts of the charging zone.
London's road network has been improved and optimised over the years for the existing traffic flows, and suddenly the traffic will want to go in different direstions to avoid the tolls, messing up the traffic light timing and priorities in the surrounding areas.
There will also be a scramble to get out of the zone before the charges start in the morning, and an extreme reluctance to enter the zone just before the end of the charging time - at 6.25 pm, you have a choice, sit still for 5 minutes or pay £5. People will crawl about to avoid reaching the charging zone before he 6.30 pm end time, making a nightmare scenario for people trying to go home by public transport and private cars alike.
I guess the effects of these issues will be far worse than the original congestion, espeically as they will move traffic problems away from the shopping and business areas inside the zone out into the residential areas just outside.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Not at all. That's auto theft. It's not like the police don't know who you are. If you were going to steal a car you'd be much better off taking one off the street, rather than taking it from a rental agency that has a photocopy of your driver's license. That's crazy.
How many credit-cards have enough room on them to cover the purchase of a car anyway? If you're stupid enough to steal a car from people who have your I.D., you might as well max-out your credit card to prepare for your new life as a fugitive.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Look at the area that London covers, look at the area that Boston covers... look at the difference in population density then ask yourself this...
HOW THE HELL COULD STREET PLANNERS WHO BUILT THE STREETS OVER 1000 YEARS AGO ADAPT THEM TO CARS.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
That's fine if you're making 30 pounds an hour. It's not so good if you're the poor bloke making 3 pounds per hour, and need every pence of it to feed your family. In which case, if by circumstance you're forced to drive to work, that parking fee is 20% of your daily wages. And the new driving fee is another 20%. By then you might just as well have stayed home and gone on the dole.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You're mistaking the population of Boston city proper (which is close to your quoted figure) with the size of the Boston metropolitan area. The metro area, which is the effective size of the city since Boston proper is landwise fairly small, is around 3 million as of 1990. Boston has been trying to correct at least some of their traffic problems with the big dig.
For comparison London has around 7 million people in the city proper and around 12 million in the metro area. Definitely more crowded, but then so is England overall so this should not be especially surprising.
While I'm all in favour of air conditioning, particularly on the 90/90* days we've had too many of already this Minnesota summer, my recollection of summers in London (yes, I used to live there, too) is that air conditioning is rarely helpful, and never necessary.
[*] Over 90F and over 90% relative humidity
--
E_NOSIG
I thought all the land was owned by Royalty back then, and the people were leased it. Or something.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
As someone who has driven in boston and london, I have some news for boston residents: really, it isnt that bad. The other drivers are a lot more friendly and forgiving (its all relative), and will give way rather than risk collisions with their vehicles. Now Paris, that city scares me. And it did have all its main streets reworked after the french revolution.
However, I dont think Boston is that optimised for cars, and the big dig isnt going to solve all the problems. Take the most car-optimised areas of the US -say LA and the bay area, and look what you get: more sprawl, same commute time as ever.
Whenever I read about another complex taxation scheme, I like to work out some numbers. Kind of like asking a charity how much of your contribution actually does the good you have in mind, vs hiring more people to annoy you with phone calls.
Transport for London, the gov't agency responsible for the fee plan, says on their website that about 250,000 people drive into the designated area daily. Their plan is to reduce this traffic by 10-15% and generate "up to" L130 million for public transit.
Okay, if traffic drops 15%, that leaves 212,500 commuters paying the L5/day fee. With about 250 working days/year this should bring in 212,500 * L5 * 250 = L265,625,000 in revenue per year. Nice chunk of change, my dad would say. That's if everybody just pays the L5 and not the L120 fine for cheating.
So they have to take in more than L260 million to end up with L130 million in usable cash? That means every L5 fee costs more than L2.50 to collect. Is this a worthwhile way to collect taxes?
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...
Correction: The Timetabled journey time by train is 3hr23mins, but would have required me arriving 30 minutes early - so the effective journey time - i.e. the amount of time lost to travelling - would be about 4 hours. (the next service takes 3hr52min and would require me to be 45minutes late for my meeting, which is just unacceptable). Of course, if I'd taken the train, I _wouldn't_ have arrived 30 minutes early, but that's the gamble you take when you take the train.
Addendum: It actually took me 1hr 42mins (I timed it, sad but true!) door-to-door to make the journey. I arrived about 15minutes early, which is around what I aimed for. Not only quicker & cheaper than the train but MUCH more convenient!
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> It's actually one of the best in the world, by my reckoning
Quite possibly. (Although, IMHO, Sydney has a much better public transport system). London probably has the best public transport network in the UK though.
The problem with LT (and the reason I mentioned, as an example, Birmingham) is that it just-about-copes most of the time, but when it goes wrong it goes REALLY wrong. You're never 10 minutes late with the Underground - you're either more-or-less ontime or an hour or more late.
There's also the bizzare (and not-as-easy-as-most-people-think) ticketing structure. I lived in Willesden Green (border of zones 2 & 3) and worked on Threadneedle Street (Bank station - zone 1) for a long time. If the tubes (Jubilee Line) were out I could catch the bus to the office *BUT* had to pay extra to take longer, since the bus route from Willesden Green goes out into Zone 3 (Even though I was starting my journey in Zone 2 and ending it in Zone 1).
> with a network of rings and axes that provide excellent city coverage
The problem is that there aren't enough rings. All-too-often if you live out in zone 3, you have to go right into the city then travel back out.
(e.g. Willesden Green to Brent Cross - about 10minutes by car. I can't remember last time I did it by tube, but it's got to be at least 45 minues)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
I hope someone mugs you for saying that, and the police don't come out to help because you didn't want to pay them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What we need are more giant parking areas with quick Central London public transport connections!
As a Londoner, I get to see the traffic problem constantly.
London traffic can be divided into four groups. The first are local residents. The second are people driving to work. The third are deliveries/essential workers, etc. The fourth are non-commercial folks going into London for shopping or recreation.
The first group live there, so we cannot remove them. Few Central London residents have cars anyway, so this is no problem.
The second group don't want to be driving around the middle of London, but feel it is their only choice because of poor public transport.
The third group are essential. Deliveries must be made, and the road network is the only system truly capable.
The fourth group drive for convenience. I am one of those people. We would rather not spend an hour on a smelly train surrounded by (mostly) grubby folk when we can sit in our air conditioned cars listening to our own music.
It's all about convenience.
There is a large out of town car park in Greenwich. It costs £4 to park there for a day. When I want to go into Central London, I park there, get on the tube at the Millennium Dome and I am in Central London within 10 minutes. It's a good idea. It keeps me off of the central london roads, and I only have to put up with public transport for 10 minutes!
What we need are more giant parking areas with quick Central London public transport connections!
I do not want to have to fight for a parking space in a tiny car park 15 miles out of town and then look forward to a one hour train journey in! They should be creating giant car parks like those at Greenwich where we can park cheaply and get into Central London within 15 minutes.
If they can't do that, many will continue to drive in, since most of us own a car BECAUSE WE DON'T *WANT* TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT. I cannot stand the people on public transport, the discomfort, and having to stand! Cut the journey times, and I'll use it for 10 minutes here and there.
mogorific carpentry experiments
The smart man in London already gives way to a BMW, because it sure as hell ain't gonna give way to you...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> shops you can walk to .
I couldn't do my normal weekly shop without a car. I physically couldn't carry it (I only have two arms.) And heaven help me if I decide to buy anything out of the ordinary (have you ever tried to get a fridge on a bus?)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> in the UK you have to get your number plates printed at your local auto parts store and they don't care if you really own the number
Not any more. Although it's very recent, the regulation of manufacturing number plates has changed quite dramatically. Funnily enough, part of the reason for the new legislation includes "The introduction of cameras for enforcement purposes means that it is more important than ever for number plates to be legible". Part of the new regulations is that manufacturers must be licenced and must identify themselves on plates that they make. (Although how the filth will identify the manufacturer of an unmarked plate is beyond me...)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> Why doesn't our so-called market economy cater for people like me ... and lots of people I know
Possibly because there isn't a market for it? If there is - which is what you're suggesting - then maybe you ought to found such a town yourself. Find yourself a patch of land with no roads and build a house - what's stopping you? And in time, maybe the "lots of people you know" will join you and your house becomes a village and then a town and maybe then a city. If there's such a demand for it you'd make a killing. Or maybe you know the real answer to your question.
> please don't drive your car down my street.
But it's not your street - it's our street. So I have a right to use it too. And I pay the government a *lot* of money for the priviledge of driving on it. Most of that money DOESN'T get spent on that street, or on public transport - it goes elsewhere in the economy. If you want to walk where there are no cars, there are plenty of opportunites to do that - in the UK we have parks, we have countryside, we have beaches, we have National Trust sites. There are places it's deemed acceptable to drive - and I drive in some of them. There are places it's deemed unacceptable to drive - and I *don't* drive in any of them. One of the places it's deemed acceptable to drive is the street - that's what they're for. If they weren't intended to be driven on, they wouldn't have that wide stretch of tarmac in the middle.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
> You may pay the government but you don't compensate for the ill-health and deaths due to pollution
/. article.
Where do you think a large proportion of the funding for the NHS comes from? Surly you're not naieve enough to beleive that your NI contributions cover it?
> I would suggest there is a market for a healthy environment for our children
So why don't you go and capitalise on it? If the market's there (I'm not convinced it is, but you seem to be), why is nobody catering to it? Why aren't YOU catering to it? Put your money where your mouth is. I wish you all the success in the world, and look forward to seeing your fuel-free Utopia featured in a future
NOBODY is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to live in an area where there are cars. Nobody. If you live in an area where there are cars, you do so by choice - YOUR choice. If you don't like where you live, the solution is very simple - go live somewhere else.
The article you link to says:
The US research showed that ozone causes the disease, but levels of ozone are usually higher in the countryside than in cities, as it is formed by sunlight
Looks like you need to go and live in a dark cave. Or is the sunlight my fault as well?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.