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

Not a new idea

[Ami Ganguli]

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.

Seems like a bad idea

[Dirtside]

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.

Re:Seems like a bad idea

[Sylvanus]

Try riding a bicycle in central London and then you'd think it was a great idea. Think of it like this:

Car Drivers = Users of IE5 and IE 6
Car Manufacturers = The Borg
Cyclists and Pedestrians = Linux and FreeBSD hackers

Around 20 Linux hackers a year are turned into Jam by ignoramuses using IE 5 (the number of cyclists killled by chromed SUVs in London) and finally the government steps in to stop the slaughter with a new law called the DMCA which the MS users club scream is an invasion of privacy. Smug kernel hackers point out that as long as you use Linux 2 wheels no one can get you with the DMCA and all PC / CD use is free.

Cue a huge rise in the number of fat-bottomed housewives picking up copies of RedHat in Dixons and the world lives happily ever after.....

Re:Seems like a bad idea

[sql*kitten]

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

No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.

Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.

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!

In NYC, there is a trend of banks like Goldman's moving to New Jersey, and Warburg's moved up to Stamford, but it's all still within close proximity to Manhattan. Technology has not advanced to the point where location is irrelevant if your business has to interact in any non-trivial way with another business. That's why there's a Silicon Valley, too.

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!)

Really, the problem is that Ken Livingstone hates cars, always has. A classical socialist, he thinks all transport should be public, and that taxation is the solution to every problem. There's only one feasible solution, and that's that the national government must hypothecate road fund tax for transport exclusively, rather than adding it to the general pot of taxation (and while I'm on the subject, do the same for NI).

If you're out in public

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Less of the terrorism nonsense

[mccalli]

That's the same as stopping terrorism, right?

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

Re:Less of the terrorism nonsense

[mccalli]

Believe me, folks, it's point is to make people think twice about driving in.

Yes, I find driving into the centre to be pointless. I work in London, but live about twenty miles west in Marlow and what I do is drive to the outskirts and get the Tube the rest of the way in.

I used to have to go near where you describe - I worked at Chase near Southwark bridge, about a five minute walk away. Now my journey is actually longer, and I have to get out to Canary Wharf. And this is my problem with the idea.

You see, my daily experience shows that the Tube can't cope with the existing numbers of passengers, let alone all the ex-drivers that they're trying to encourage down there. Basically, there's no public infrastructure capable of taking the extra burden caused by people dumping their cars in the centre.

That's the annoyance - because no alternative has been put in place, the whole thing essentially plays out as just being another tax. People who have to drive will still have to drive, because the alternatives are swamped already.

Bring on the crossrail project, that's what I say. Charge after that's in place (a virtually-non-stopping east/west link across the city, for those not familiar with the idea), rather than just punitively before anyone can do anything about it.

Cheers,
Ian

New tube tickets

[Builder]

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!

Why not the other way round?

[sluggie]

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...

Not The Government

[JimPooley]

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...

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.