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TECHNOLOGY WATCH - Speed cameras get smart.
AS FORMER FEDERAL COURT Judge Marcus Einfeld would confirm, there’s no escaping demerit points these days. Lacking a dead American academic to shoulder the blame, more than 100 drivers a day in NSW lose their licences; in Victoria, another 60,000 share their fate each year. These numbers have ballooned in recent years thanks to the cane toad-like spread of the speed camera.
In Poland they hide the cameras in fake garbage bins, a tactic previously employed in New Zealand and Western Australia. In the Netherlands they have a $100,000 machine that is virtually indestructible; if attacked by angry motorists it reports the assault to a local police station. In the UK, a shadowy balaclava-clad group known as Motorists Against Detection has disabled thousands of the hated devices, condemning them as “Greed cameras”, designed only to raise revenue for lazy councils.
But the machines like to stay one step ahead. Automated Number Plate Recognition systems (such as the Safe-T-Cam tracking trucks on NSW highways) register your licence plate on one camera, then measure how long it takes you to get to the next one. Arrive sooner than the speed limit would allow and you’re pinged. Average-speed cameras now operate in Scotland and may soon be used to punish speedsters on all the UK’s motorways. But that’s not all they can do: in Victoria the ANPR camera checks each plate against a database that alerts police instantly if a vehicle is unregistered, or its driver is unlicensed or subject to outstanding arrest warrants - and tells them where it is.
Terrifying? Orwellian? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The next generation of tracking, Electronic Vehicle Identification, will bring a glow to the icy hearts of bureaucrats maddened by the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is in breach of a traffic regulation. A tiny radio transmitter in every car and high precision sensors all along the road network could mean never getting away with anything ever again.
Enthusiasts in the UK say that, apart from monitoring your location and speed at all times, EVI could catch you straying into a bus lane, performing an illegal U-turn, running a red light, driving too close to the car in front or outstaying your welcome in a parking space. The first you’d know about it would be when the computer popped an infringement notice in your letterbox.
Of course, as your spouse will undoubtedly point out,
if you don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. See you at the bus stop.My thought for today. - Werner
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
A day without sunshine is like...........night.
1 comment:
“Speed” can mean a couple of things, for the government and the drug traffickers it means – lots of money. Being watched is of course a practice perfected under the Nazis and Stalin.
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