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

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.

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

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...