French City To Use CCTV For Parking Fines

horza writes "The city of Nice, France is rolling out 626 CCTV cameras throughout town, giving it one of the highest levels of surveillance in the world (1.8 cameras per 1000 inhabitants). The usual rhetoric was given — that they will be used solely for reducing violent crime — but the city will now begin sending out parking tickets solely based on the CCTV video evidence."

Comments

Revenue Collection

[Ethanol-fueled]

Here we go again, one of my greatest fears and the next logical step for law enforcement: Shifting focus from public safety to revenue collection. Fixed DHS checkpoints are running random searches for petty drug possesion and proper vehicle paperwork, in the name of "keeping $HOME_COUNTRY safe." Random police "DUI" checkpoints are impounding far more sober than drunk drivers, not even making a dent in drunk driving statistics.

The solution to the problem lies with a past state of a red-light camera in San Diego, near the Aero drive exit right off the 8 freeway - One of the cameras was dangling from its support post, literally hanging by a few threads. Some brave hero must have seen the tell-tale flash of a $400 citation, got out of his or her vehicle, and decapitated the fucking camera with a baseball bat.

And now, we must do the same. With fake license plates, motorized, retractable license plate covers for the red-light cameras, and heapin' helpins of baseball bat.

Re:Revenue Collection

[Ash Vince]

The UK law stipulates that councils are not allowed to simply charge for parking as a revenue stream, there has to be some benefit to the local population/businesses such as relieveing congestion, and as bikes don't cause congestion we're currently fighting Westminster Counsil in the European Courts of the legality of the charges.

I am curious, how does a bike not cause any congestion? Granted they take up far less space than a car but they still take up space on the road so if there are enough bike riders going down the same road then you can still have congestion. Or were you referring to when they are parked? Not that this makes any difference because a parked bike takes up about 20 percent of the physical space of a car so it could still cause congestion if inconsiderately parked. So bikes CAN cause congestion just nowhere near as much as cars do.

I am a regular cyclist in Central London and you even get bicycle congestion now during rush hour. The fact is that central london has far too many people who work here and need to travel in from the surrounding area so any form of transport will suffer congestion during rush hour. Even pedestrians suffer congestion now due to the sheer number of people who all start work at 9am so all need to get into the center of london just before then.

Re:Revenue Collection

[CarpetShark]

No offense to cyclists (I cycle too, but offroad), however I think, if anything, bikes on roads tend to cause MORE congestion than cars. Bicycles are very slow, and I'm always trying to be extra cautious around them, which means that I'm driving slower, and the people in front or behind me seem to act similarly as they pass. Motorbikes aren't so slow, but they tend to be really cocky and think they're invincible. In fact, they're largely surviving because more careful car drivers are going out of their way to keep them alive by making extra room etc.

prevention

[MrBrainport]

We could use CCTV surveillance to prevent corruption :)

Laser Pointers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: Laser Pointers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0TgaGePhJA

Once enough people get tired of their governments setting up privacy-invading surveillance networks, all it takes is a dedicated few people who run around and aim laser pointers at all the CCD cameras. Eventually the governments would get tired of replacing them.

Re:Laser Pointers!

[KDR_11k]

Mess with the police's equipment and see how long it'll take them to care. Do you want to be thrown into prison for that?

Re:Laser Pointers!

[Rockoon]

You are supposing that the enforcement end of the police are actually happy about these systems.

Personally, I think that every time a community installs shit like this, each officer becomes worried about job security. After all, the end result is not needing traffic cops, which most of them are.

Even so...

[Gordonjcp]

... I'd rather live in a city with CCTV cameras than a city with poorly-trained armed police ready to start shooting at any moment, privately-run prisons that require a constant stream of new inmates to keep the workshops running and the profits up, and drug and alcohol laws that even the Taliban think are a tad excessive.

not the first time...

[mayberry42]

This is not the first time I've heard "this is for your own safety" arguments only to have them turn out as thinly veiled guises of trying to make money at your expense. Details escape me, but not too long ago, somewhere in the US, a town added red light cameras which took a snapshot of your car and sent you the fine for running a red light. In a matter of months, it was so successful that very few, if anybody, ran red lights anymore. You think they'd be happy - after all, they probably DID save lives. So why did they take them down? Because the revenue from tickets (those types anyway) was reduced to a big, fat 0

This also makes you wonder what else is being done "for our safety", when in reality it's just a way to take your money. Surely at least speeding enforcement must be exempt from this. Oh wait...

Rothbard was right when he said that governments only have destructive ways of making money (of course, he was referring to taxation at the time, but a valid point non the less)

I think this will result in fewer tickets

[George_Ou]

Parking tickets are like Vegas Casinos. If they make the table odds too high, then they lose a lot of customers. Installing cameras will just mean that people won't be willing to take risks any more since there's a certainty that they will be caught. Cities catch people because people can actually get away with a lot of red meters, but they end up getting caught more in the long run.

Re:I think this will result in fewer tickets

[John Hasler]

So don't make the odds too high. Having a picture of you parked at a red meter does not obligate them to send you a ticket. They can just ticket a randomly-selected subset of the observed violations (and the bureaucrats can perhaps make a bit of money on the side arranging for you to be in that subset...)

Re:Not so Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Still. Why do you object? Are you hiding something? Are you a law breaker? Maybe we should put you under watch...by a computerized algorithm of course. After all, their judgment is never flawed.

Re:Not so Nice

[somersault]

Yeah, you're meant to leave 15 metres of space at all junctions. I saw some incredibly bad parking the other day where I wasn't sure at first if the driver was waiting halfway through the junction, about to pull out, turns out the car was just parked there driverless, with many other cars parked in front of it over the double yellow lines. It's even worse than the roundabout lane discipline people have.

Re:London

[Thanshin]

"because of his unthinking attitude that we get such draconian restrictions"

This reminds me of the very poor argument for why DRM in software exists. Pirates exist, therefore everyone should suffer, not just the pirate. What happens is that these policies just end up harming the average citizen and not the people they're intended to hurt.

Except in that case nobody bothered to prove the line of events, which is kind of the main point.

i.e.: You can argue the "stops are forbidden" law by stating that "stops have less of an influence in people than the traffic law that concerns them has on the general public; just as many of us argue DRM by stating that "piracy has less of an influence in affected people than DRM on the general public". Were you to use that argument you'd be wrong, though.

Re:Videoprotection

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously have you ever driven in Nice? People are double parked everywhere and at any time. The entire city is constantly jammed because two lanes streets are turned into a narrow one lane street. People just stop their car and leave them in the middle of the street blocking traffic and those parked into the proper parking zones. They even double park in intersections blocking two streets for the price of one.

Cops in Nice are useless or never to be seen and only the gendarmes seem to care about traffic violation, but they can only operate on the highway. I live on the outskirts of Nice and never ever drive into the centre, I'd even drive miles to end up in Italy where things are quieter than going inside Nice on a Saturday afternoon.

What's the other stuff they've done. They've put cameras on traffic lights so that people stop running thru red lights because 50% of all scooters and two-wheelers just run thru red lights like it was only for cars. And guess what: people complain because they've been caught doing it.

Anyone who has learned how to drive in the US, Canada, UK, EIRE, Switzerland, Germany,etc... will have a heart attack driving here.

Re:Videoprotection

[RealGrouchy]

The entire city is constantly jammed because two lanes streets are turned into a narrow one lane street

Sounds like Copenhagen before they started focusing on bicycles, public transit, and pedestrians (who are now, by far, in the majority).

- RG>