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New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

thedrive.com

341–350 of 525 posts

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#341
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll assume you aren’t in the U.K. (which this article is about), because the U.K. system is almost exactly as you describe! > Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding. Uk has a combination of: * Average speed cameras (as per the Norway…

As opposed to the U.S., where parked highway patrol cars conceal themselves in blinds where you can't see them until they've already clocked your speed. Most Americans believe they have a quota of speeding tickets that must be met.

The U.K. has that too! They just won’t usually do a traffic stop, you just get a letter though the post.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#342
post #17

I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace. In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit. If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photog…

> but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you. Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera. I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely…

As long as we are talking about a speeding ticket, you are correct. But since around 2017 it is a crime to conduct an illegal road race. This covers extreme cases of speeding with quite harsh punishments: impounding of the vehicle, high fines or jail time for the driver - and the owner if the owner could have reasonably suspected that the driver was about to do it.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#343
post #221
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better: in Germany, the cameras black out the passenger's side of the car automatically for privacy reasons, so that only the driver is identified. This was a problem in 2008 when a car with steering wheel on the right systematically got caught speeding. The driver knew full well what was going on an placed a muppet in the passeger's seat. The picture is fantastic: https://gizmodo.com/the-muppets-animal-caught-s…

This is funny, but in repeated cases the authorities would require the car owner to keep a driving log for that car. So this wouldn't work for very long.

Really? They can require that in Germany? Imagine if they did that in the US, I suspect most drivers here are unable to read.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#344

I think society will soon discover that a certain % of rule breaking is absolutely necessary for it to function. My car has a speed limiter, radio and a computer. Imagine a near future where speed limits are sent via radio then enforced by the car computer. No more infringement!

Lots of places in the world where speed limits are enforced automatically and strictly, and society seems to work just fine.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#346

Maybe I'm missing something but the "The Drive" article and the article they reference [1] talk about reading license plates up to half a mile (750m): > read the license plates of speeding cars almost half a mile (750 m) away. In actuality, the TruCam II itself is technically capable of clocking plates up to almost a full mile (1.5 km) But the actual product spec of the device [2] says: > Quickly view license plate d…

Number plates are pretty low to the ground - I wonder if at 1500m the curvature of the earth actually obscures the plate?

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#347
post #336

There’s too much focus on the easy to measure speed problem. I’m not saying inappropriate speed should not be enforced against but i strongly believe more effort should be applied to avoid the more common cause of major road traffic incidents - inattention. You can’t easily measure inattention but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The solution doesn’t only have to be in penalties, it could be in making it harder t…

Inattention is hard to measure and results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed, which is easy to measure. If the goal is to reduce overall traffic victims, then investing in speed control seems like the low hanging fruit. The energy of vehicle (thus, the energy absorbed during impact by every object contained or hit) is proportinal with the square of the speed. Meanwhile, the reaction time availa…

The problem is that naive arguments about speed and laws based on fixed numbers don't really help anything except ease of prosecution. Inappropriate choice of speed can obviously be dangerous, but what is appropriate to the conditions and what the fixed numerical speed limits dictate can be wildly different.

For example, the default speed limit in the UK on most residential roads is 30mph, but if you drive past a school at 30mph at the end of the afternoon when the kids are coming out and there are lots parked cars obscuring your view, that is still inappropriately fast for the conditions.

However, slower isn't always safer. On a motorway, the speed limit is usually 70mph, but in poor weather conditions and heavy traffic, everyone travelling at lower and similar speeds may be the safest choice. If you're the one driver insisting on unnecessarily doing 20mph when everyone else is doing a steady 40mph, you're also increasing the danger to yourself and others.

Another example is that the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles on many of our major roads was increased by 10mph in 2015, having previously been 20mph below what cars were allowed to do on the same roads. The results were notable for several reasons, among them that the actual average speed of those heavy vehicles only increased a little but the safety of the roads appears to have increased. This was attributed primarily to closing the gap in speeds between different types of vehicle and thus, among other things, reducing instances of queues behind and overtaking of the slower vehicles, both of which increase the risk of an accident.

Finally, we have the classic motorway speeding situation, where on an open road in good conditions, a competent driver with a suitable vehicle could do far more than the legal limit of 70mph with negligible increase in risk. Moreover, statistically our motorways are both our fastest roads and yet also among our safest. You could certainly print money by setting up a covert speed camera watching some stretches of motorway, but whether it is a good use of police resources if your objective is to increase road safety is a different question.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#348

Maybe I'm missing something but the "The Drive" article and the article they reference [1] talk about reading license plates up to half a mile (750m): > read the license plates of speeding cars almost half a mile (750 m) away. In actuality, the TruCam II itself is technically capable of clocking plates up to almost a full mile (1.5 km) But the actual product spec of the device [2] says: > Quickly view license plate d…

Number plates are pretty low to the ground - I wonder if at 1500m the curvature of the earth actually obscures the plate?

Unless you're driving on a salt flat, I doubt the curvature of the earth is a bigger concern than the contours of the terrain or turns in the road.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia is the most nanny state country that I know of. The driving rules are absolutely draconian. In fact when I was growing up there, I was baffled at how aggressive the enforcement was, while at the same time the general level of driving ability was so low. Would you like to be responsible and have a designated driver to drive your inebriated friends home safely? Nope. Not allowed. Drivers on their L or P plate…

Indeed — Brit-turned-Aussie here — the drivers here are absolutely atrocious. I often say that Brits can be pretty rude until they get behind the wheel, whereupon they turn in to gracious, giving angels. Australians directly mirror this: in person, they’re adorable, yet behind the wheel they’re selfish monsters. I hate driving in this country. So much so that I don’t own a car.

I had the exact opposite experience with Aussie drivers - with the exceptions of taxi drivers, who were the absolute worst, it was always easy to merge lanes, noone driving too dangerous or fast.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#350
post #247
post #17

I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace. In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit. If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photog…

A friend of mine was traveling across france on a motorcycle (this was decades ago) and one day had to get home to england quite quickly. So he got on the tollway and went quickly. But apparently they checked entrance and exit times on the tickets and would calculate your speed, so he "lost" his ticket and paid the max cost to be safe. I guess it worked.

In France they don't do that. At least not yet.

There are a lot of automatic speed radars (at a single point), and a bit fewer average speed radars but they work over a few km at most (and don't interact with the toll).

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