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

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

#301

Post by alkonaut »

_ph_ wrote: post #219
Scoundreller wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

German here. Indeed only the driver of a car is punished for speeding. The burdon is on the officials to determine the driver. But they will send an official inquiry to the car owner to name the driver of the car, if the identification is not obvious by a photo. There are cases where no one gets the ticket, because the driver is not named by the car owner, sometimes for very valid reason. With a larger group of peopl…

Sweden: it’s not possible to charge an owner for a crime, only the driver. It’s also not a crime to not name the driver.

If a speed camera photo is blurry or dark (like in a place with darkness most of the year) the case is as far as I know closed and no inquiry is made.

If I realize too late that I’m going to speed past a traffic cam then I usually just hold my hand up near the wind screen to cover my face and the risk of a ticket would be nearly zero.

There has been talk of making it an administrative fee rather than a crime (like parking tickets) which would make it possible to attribute to cars and not owners.

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

#302

Post by alkonaut »

timc3 wrote: post #144
rconti wrote: post #3

I'm curious about the context of the $13,000 price tag. Is this a slight upcharge? Or an order of magnitude? I'm what the Brits might call a "keen motorist", but as someone who considers speed enforcement a necessary evil, there's a world of difference between paying a bit more for much better tech, versus way more. If this costs 4x what a normal radar gun costs, one must ask "what is the problem we're solving", and…

They will make it back in fines. Unfortunately some Police in some areas seem addicted to the revenue. Its a drop in the ocean.

If police departments have any kickback from fines, that’s a massive organizational mistake. It creates crazy incentives to maximize fines instead of reducing crime. I thought only the US had made that mistake.

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

#303

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ISL wrote: 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…

> the bill goes to the car owner

Presumably this doesn't apply with a 'formal' rental arrangement?

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

#304

Post by dabbledash »

alkonaut wrote: post #296
dabbledash wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Beyond that, if you don’t want to get a fine, don’t speed My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and ident…

> I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition. Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.

But I think one of the things we see with technology and privacy is that there’s a real difference between things that you can do, but they require manual human action and are therefor costly, and things that are done effortlessly and constantly. We’ve always had license plates, but we haven’t always had a government record of where every car has travelled. We will soon, I’m sure.

And right now it’s true you can mostly walk or bike around in public without being tracked, but that’s just until we get the facial recognition really going. Then the argument will be that you were always showing your face in public and it was always possible that someone would recognize you so this is no different. But of course it will be different.

And now it’s possible, if you have a conversation in a cafe, that someone will overhear you. But if every conversation were being recorded, transcribed, and transmitted to the authorities, that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.

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

#305

Post by lotsofpulp »

loeg wrote: post #81
lotsofpulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it not be a competitive disadvantage? Auto insurance profit margins are very low, and I’m sure the actuaries have access to plenty of data about losses correlated with speeding. If a speeding ticket did not result in higher losses (probabilistically, not in specific individual cases of course), then a person with a speeding ticket should be able to find cheaper insurance. The other option is there’s highly qu…

You're not arguing against a statement I've made.

Then I’m unsure what you mean by “noisy and weak” signal if it does not lead to a mispriced insurance product.

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

#306

Post by MaxBarraclough »

iso947 wrote: post #271
spoonjim wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"un-sporting"? It's not a game. It's about reducing the most common cause of preventable death. The harms to privacy or "freedom" or whatnot are more defensible here than pretty much anywhere else.

In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents, way below “driver didn’t look properly”, which was 9 times as common. As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths. https://www.regtransfers.co.uk/content/common-causes-for-roa... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/u…

> In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents

That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits.

Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.

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

#307

Post by jdbernard »

konschubert wrote: post #297
fierarul wrote: post #286

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!

If a law is bad when enforced, then the law needs to be changed, not the enforcement. Arbitrary enforcement leads to discrimination and corruption. Regarding the speed limit, I think the laws are just finde and should simply be enforced.

I think the concern is not so much a desire for arbitrary enforcement as it is a fear of perfect enforcement at all times. I think some degree of freedom is a fundamental need of the human being, even from the rules we set for ourselves. We don't actually want all of our laws to be perfectly enforced all of the time, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the laws themselves are unlikely to ever be perfect, even if perfect enforcement leads to more scrutiny and tweaking.

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

#308

Post by t-writescode »

drusepth wrote: post #2

The less visibility police personally have on the car they're doing the reading on (e.g. half-mile away & at night), the less they're capable of introducing human bias (e.g. profiling) into who they scan and who they don't. Seems like a win-win for enforcing the law and doing so equally on everyone.

If this meant that we had reasonable speed limits in all areas based on current conditions, I might be more cool with that.

We do not.

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

#309

Post by alkonaut »

whoooooo123 wrote: post #213
Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, there are 38,000 persons killed each year in car accidents -- and yet there are still those who think we do too much enforcement.

Maybe more enforcement isn't the solution? Traffic stops are far more common in the US than the UK, but the US has far higher road deaths, even when you adjust for the fact that Americans spend more time travelling by road. Maybe the cause of America's excess road deaths is something else?

The US has terrible infrastructure (in many parts of the US you can find a 50mph multi-lane road in a plane 4-way intersection to another similar road, where a sleeping or drunk driver might just sped through a red light and T-bone someone!).

Infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians is often bad.

There is also no zero acceptance for drunk driving. You see people drive to restaurants, have a glass of wine or two, then drive home. Unimaginable.

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

#310

Post by thinkingemote »

kitd wrote: post #295
7952 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is approximately one for every 200km of road. Hardly seems like a lot.

They're focussed on the heavily used sections though, ie where they are more likely to be encountered. By that measure (kms driven), they're much more common.

I imagine that they would be on the motorways?
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