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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
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
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!
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.
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?
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"
> 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.
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
Public Transportation in the USA: Clean, Reliable, Affordable. Choose None.
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!)
It already costs £1 for 20 minutes parking in some parts of central London, and this doesn't deter people - quite the opposite, a lot of the motorists you see driving slowly and clogging up the roads are just cruising for an empty parking place.
The problem is that London does not have a good ring-road that lets people drive from one side to the other. This cross town traffic would be unaffected by parking fee increases in the centre.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
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