201–210 of 268 posts
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If only they put that effort towards... any other aspect of BART...
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The DB5 in Goldfinger (1964) had revolving licence plates. A cursory Google search comes up with some shady websites that sell similar tech, but it would be a nice DIY project to make a licence plate screen that can be changed on the fly (e-ink based maybe). Has anyone tried it?
the only time I saw this in real life was a twenty-something guy with a high powered street motorcycle. It was not stock and had odd parts (which makes other mods less obvious). I believe he had a kill switch for all lights on the bike, which made reading the plate at night more difficult, but the immediate use was to run from a hiway patrol when challenged. No idea how that worked out for him over time.
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But when mass transit phases out paper tickets, "use the convenient app for a 20% discount!", it's not much better... Even with paper tickets, if you paid with a credit card there's now a perfect record: Jim Smith got on at the Fruitvale station and got off in Fremont, stayed there two hours, and then came back the same way.
the old trick at the air port was to buy mulitple tickets leaving around the same time to different destinations at multiple airports ultimately traveling under false ID under a different name. that's surely feasible for pretty much anybody not just super spies, right?
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I don't really disagree with your points, but your usecase is nowhere near the norm where I live or how I live. I'm perfectly fine with city dwellers having more bikes (if they so choose), whatever helps the traffic and parking in the cities. My point still stands that in no way is a bike a replacement for all the utilities of a vehicle, whether you're offloading that by renting, borrowing, etc. I'll drive my vehicle…
Yes, choice is good - my point was simply that the vast majority of American vehicle miles traveled are not doing things which can only be done by a large, expensive car or truck. I suspect in the future we’re going so see a lot more electric LSVs, too, since an awful lot of trips don’t need to go over 30mph and saving $20-30k plus maintenance is appealing to a lot of people.
Source? People get cars because they need one. The first big thing you get for yourself is a car, because it's so useful.
I believe the opposite of your statement is true, biking is only really practical in a very limited bubble.
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the only time I saw this in real life was a twenty-something guy with a high powered street motorcycle. It was not stock and had odd parts (which makes other mods less obvious). I believe he had a kill switch for all lights on the bike, which made reading the plate at night more difficult, but the immediate use was to run from a hiway patrol when challenged. No idea how that worked out for him over time.
Hard to run away from an oncoming truck which didn't see you because you were running dark
I believe that license plates used to be made of metal with reflective coating and ridges (made by prison labor?) but today on the street I am seeing what looks like white paper with black lettering?
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This would be flagged immediately. Law enforcement cameras check the plate against the registered make, model, and colour (which are public record in the UK)
What happens if you paint your car? Are you supposed to inform your gov't?
Family member of mine actually got in trouble because the dealership typed the wrong color into the registration paperwork. The color on the registration didn't match the actual color of the car therefore it was considered illegally registered and the car was impounded during a routine traffic stop.
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Something you could do anyway with a network of $50 android phones mounted on bridges over freeways. But this way you don't have to pay for the cameras - someone else has done it for you.
Not even close. Cars on a freeway are doing 10 to 100mph. To capture a plate on a moving car you need less than 1" of movement during the exposure time. At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per s…
Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a phone camera to work at night with an LED flash though
(oh and also, this assumes you want to catch people speeding, to capture every plate number you would just put the camera near a slow area like a bend or stop sign)
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Not even close. Cars on a freeway are doing 10 to 100mph. To capture a plate on a moving car you need less than 1" of movement during the exposure time. At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per s…
You assumed the camera was capturing a photo of the car viewed from the side where the full speed is apparent (and ironically where the plate will not even be visible). Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a…
No, I'm not joking. If we're not going to put serious legal restrictions and penalties on this kind of tracking, the only other viable option is to eliminate license plates entirely.
Here in Austin, there is at least one sane City Councilman who is pushing for a maximum 3 minute retention time for license plate scan event data. I expect that would get pushed to 30-180 minutes in reality, but there is no justification for any longer than that...
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You assumed the camera was capturing a photo of the car viewed from the side where the full speed is apparent (and ironically where the plate will not even be visible). Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a…
I assure you the motion blur, even looking down the same plane (parallel) to the car will not be able to capture the plate, even in decent light on video alone. Go try to take video yourself of a car driving by in full daylight.
But there are other approaches too - like putting a 99 cent novelty zoom lens on the front of your camera to capture more light for your region of interest, allowing you to use shorter exposure times. Or an infrared strobe light that flashes once per frame (most numberplates are retroreflective, so IR strobes work really well).