-For a few days, maybe even a few weeks, it might be ok. Then, suddenly, law enforcement realizes that speeding ticket revenue has fallen to $0 and start systematically pushing for lower speed limits, citing the same studies, only this time they’d have “Well, look how well it’s doing so far!” on their side. Then we’d be in the same position, only going slower for our trouble.

I say F the police.

When the government outsources the enforcement of laws to an outside vendor in return for a percentage of the fines (which is usually the case with these types of systems), you are *guaranteed* that steps will be taken to increase the revenue.

To me, *that* is the worrisome thing.

See http://www.pipstechnology.co.uk/news.php??section_id=9&article_id=307 for example.

I would also (were I a city planner) use it to monetise my city road system, charging a per-mile usage quota for every journey within my municipality. It is like a gated system only better, you get to charge people for the priviledge of entering _and_ keep out undesirables. They (PIPS) already have plans for automated entry systems in the Minder(TM) system.

GPS is being used to track City vehicles, such as snow plows (Howard Co, MD; Cincinnati, OH) and garbage trucks (Dallas, TX). Not to punish drivers, but to have solid responses to entitlement-bloated residents who like to call and complain that their cul-de-sac hasn’t been plowed 15 minutes after it starts snowing, or to discredit claims that the garbage truck came “too early” or “skipped our house”.

I’ve worked on this kind of tech: do you have ANY idea how many pieces of equipment in EVERY town and city have GPS receivers on them? Almost everything. Water pumps, traffic light controllers, intersection cameras, streetlights, streetsweepers; dude, these things are truly ubiquitous. And HARMLESS. They aren’t used for tracking fixed assets like city infrastructure, they are used to synchronise clocks. Simply that. So if these spooky speed cameras have GPS receivers in them, which is a great idea if you’re gonna try to, oh I don’t know- TIME A VEHICLE as it passes two fixed points, it’s not because someone is deploying spy satellites on us.

Oh, and here’s a fun one for the conspiracy theorists: Many mobile towers have terrestrial GPS transmitters on them, which increases the accuracy of mobile GPS receivers. Space-based GPS is only accurate to within a dozen or so centimetres (if you have a large antenna), but with terrestrial transmitters, you can get centimetre-resolution accuracy. It’s used by road-building companies all the time to control heavy equipment, and there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t be used to track the GPS receiver in your phone to within a few centimetres.

All that rant being said, I am guessing that their Plain Old Radar-based speed cameras were loosing in court too many times, so they had to come up with a better system. This is WAY cheaper than the old way of timing vehicles, which (here in Canada) was for police in aircraft to fly over the highways and time cars as they passed over white marks on the road. These systems are going to be a lot harder to beat in traffic court, I tell you that. Which sucks ass.

The way around this is to slow down and stop running red lights. It keeps construction workers from getting killed in work zones, too.

They should just stick to the twelve steps.

In which case, since the motivation behind this system is clearly the money generated from speeding fines etc, do we feel that if the laws in question are just then the state is entitled to use their enforcement as a revenue stream?

(Incidentally, the copyright gods could learn a few things from traffic enforcement. If the penalty for being caught breaking copyright was a £30 fine, the industry would make millions and the public would have an incentive to keep the right side of the law but without living in fear and hatred.)

All that rant being said, I am guessing that their Plain Old Radar-based speed cameras were loosing in court too many times, so they had to come up with a better system.

Nah, there’s nothing really wrong with the old system. This one is just New and Flashier and hence the government will want to spend money on it. It’s not about the technology at all.

So I would guess there is some other way to find out the license plate number involved? Finding it a bit confusing.

Also I imagine it won’t take long before Jeremy Clarkson bribes some Russians to bump another satellite into this one.

The satellites don’t see the plate from space, two cameras on the ground do. They have gps recievers in them, hence the “satellite” bit. They read your plate at point A, read your plate at point B, and compute your speed based on the time you took to traverse the distance between the two.

What the advantage of this over a radar or laser based speed camera is I have no idea. Perhaps the fact that to be effective you have to buy two. Not really an advantage to the municipality, but an advantage to the vendor.