m42, wtf?

[Tahrey1043]

seriously - from j9 southwards..... theres like a camera every 200 yards or less, either speed radar or cctv - wtf??

[Krupa]

Ah the M42, those have been there for a while I used to curse them every time I went past.

I did the Cardiff-Sheffield-Cardiff trip sometimes twice a week last year, and every time I went I saw someone get caught by those cameras!

[GroovyCarrot]

I'll be bearing that in mind if I ever find myself on the m42

[Tahrey1043]

i'm not talking about the Gatsos in the 50mph zone, i already know ALL about those mothers

take another trip along there, join at like j10 or j9 heading south and keep going so long as your mind can take it all in. if you have to keep concentrating on the driving (and your speedo) then have a passenger train a camcorder on the left side of the road, canted slightly upwards. you'll see the white tick-marks along the edge of the lanes easy enough.

mind you, my original question i think has been answered in a couple of papers today - page somethingorother of the metro, and the front page of the daily mail...... probably not just the most audacious and rotten SPECS system ever (fair enough, it's a high traffic road and will benefit greatly from variable limits at peak times - but those mothers are going to be running 24/7 to ensure you don't dare exceed 75mph EVER on that... what... 15 mile stretch? there's absolutely no need for that many cameras!) but also another "trial" site for another bit of big brother technology.

basically they're going to record the plate of every car that goes past any camera fitted with this system - which besides the CCTV style things, could basically include everything bar the original film-based gatsos, which i think we can safely predict will quickly vanish - and log where everyone goes. it's being touted as a way of catching criminals thick enough to ride around in a 'hot' car, and 'suspect vehicles' such as the untaxed and uninsured (as many as a million, out of 35 million...?!?! aw, c'monnnn). all well and proper, you think, especially with the claimed figures for how many extra crooks the police claim to have caught with the trial systems already in place... but, consider

* once the tax and insurance evasion have been pretty much eradicated, there goes a major reason - and 'legitimate' funding source - for running these things. the maintenance alone must be quite incredible.
* with the new tax and licensing systems, soon it's going to be a lot harder to get away with these offenses anyhow. without APNR, the numbers may well dry up rapidly. however, if it is launched around the same time officers begin to crack down under the new scheme, how easy would it be to claim success for all the wrong reasons?
* car-driving crims will get wise to this caper pretty quick. how bloody hard can it be to either nick a car, or quickly change the plates (or ditch them, etc), and fool a tracking system based on one exterior feature? to my knowledge it doesn't log make/model/colour or a photograph (usable pics of ten million cars many, many times a day, even in the modern world the neccessary amount of storage - and cost of it - boggles the mind)....
* will bring an insane amount of speed fine money rolling in - just with one camera in bangor and one in birmingham last weekend, neither with speed radar capabilities, i'd be 3 points up and who knows how many pounds down, for an 80mph average including surface streets. tighten up the distances, add radar/laser speed checking..... and start dropping limits like flies... and see it pour in, and people lose licenses/"freedom" all over the place.
* open to an incredible amount of abuse. it's an automated system, that's too massive and too high volume for anyone to effectively police the use or misuse of. police handling surveillance orders or administrating punishments for offenses at street level can exercise discretion and (hopefully) recognise when something may well be BS and they're keeping track/planning the easy arrest of someone who is doing nothing more harmless than publicly expressing dismay at government policies...

christ on a bloody crutch...

PS saddam's got missiles he can launch at us within 45 minutes of declaring war. mm'kay?
and speed kills..... so do your duty - drive everywhere exactly at the limit and don't let anyone past, the irresponsible scumbags. not even ambulance, police, or fire engine drivers, because honestly, they should know better than to endanger everyones lives by exceeding the posted limit, shouldn't they?

edit: if the govt. REALLY cared about speed, congestion and the like, road fund licensing would be out of the window and petrol prices would be hiked to cover the difference - after all, it would be partially distance-travelled, partially weight on (& damage to) the road, and partially fossil fuel use/environment damage based, all quite fair. And as fuel consumption is poor in-city, rises irreversibly with speed above about 35-40mph, and drastically so once you move into current motorway cruising speeds, all it would need is this price rise and a stunningly brief public information ad campaign pointing out the factually provable difference in fuel consumption / costs / ecological & urban health damage (far more so than crash deaths) at these different speeds and locations, and there would be a massive shift in the general driving speeds on our roads. A voluntary one. Not one enforced by the threat of heavy fines, loss of license, imprisonment or a vague, unprovable risk of death, but a voluntary choice to save money - limited resources - and the environment - on every trip. In an emergency, there would still be the opportunity to go faster in order to save time (even if not much - but sometimes, every last second counts), at the expense of burning up a lot more pound-per-litre petrol, or to travel through the city by road rather than public transport/cycling/walking, using similarly drastic amounts of fuel, but it would be a choice - and the crime of speeding, i.e. travelling at an unsafe speed could still exist, if only to reign in the uncommonly rich types who still couldn't give a crap.

The roads probably still wouldn't be any safer, people paying less attention to the actual driving when moving slower, and inner city average speeds would increase with reduced congestion, but equally important benefits would be acheived.

of course, with a proposed shift to hybrid, electric, or hydrogen, all that goes out of the window, for inner city driving with hybrids (discounting the crap peddled by ford and honda), and everywhere for electric / fuel cell (they STILL need more energy to travel fast, but the cost of it is ALREADY much, MUCH lower than petrol).....

interesting... but then, electric (and fuel cell) cars have great acceleration, but their top speeds are surprisingly much lower than an equivalently nippy petrol or even turbodiesel car, and many commercial variants are already electronically limited (to avoid motor and battery damage by non-enthusiast layman drivers).
and will come with GPS sat nav and permanently enabled anti-theft trackers as standard.

wonder what life on Sark is like.

beats living in New China. the old one has "freedom of speech", "individual rights" and "democratic elections" as well*, alongside a very much industry-led economy and economic policy, repressive laws, well-funded and highly active state policing... and a clear mind towards war against the colonies that oppose their rule.
(*not, but they claim to)

[DanW]

ah crap take a look at this

[Tahrey1043]

The national rollout of the UK police's ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) system is kicking off, with the goal of deploying a network of over 2,000 cameras on motorways, major roads and city centres. The system is claimed to be able to run database checks on 3,600 plates per hour, on vehicles travelling at speeds of up to 100 mph - but there are just a few snags.

well there's your answer - either only travel at times when there's likely to be more than 1 car per second travelling past the cameras, and hope you get lucky, or go everywhere at over 100mph.

or of course, just clone a plate off an identical model. there's been enough stress caused over that kind of behaviour with the congestion charge...

the standard unplated scrambler bike, balaclava, and backpack with modified paintball gun and supply of IR-blocking black enamel paintballs will probably be a decent alternative.

it'd be nice to shout for a revolution along the lines of whats been going down in krg....kryg..... that ex-soviet country that i've heard pronounced five different ways by four different newscasters... but i'm wondering whether that sort of thing will soon even be viable. it didn't work in frigging tiananmen, did it?
supposedly the conservatives will remove speed cameras from the roads if they get into power. whether they will make good on this (being the shi'ites that introduced them, after all), or replace them with a similar system to the above, remains to be seen. wonder what the liberal standpoint on all the bullcrapacy is?

sad thing is, the stuff and it's associate technologies will probably work well for it's intended purpose. crimes will go down, arrests for genuine offenses will be up, and the roads will become safer. but at what cost? sure, there is still a detectable level of crime and traffic accidents in this country, but........... dare i come out with such stuff...? its something ive felt for a while but i dont think it'll be a popular opinion, probably seen as overly cold hearted (deep breath)
...........it's hardly rampant. we're not dying in a wave of endemic organised crime or corruption like russia, or america of the prohibition era (both nice examples of tight govt controls on pretty random things, btw), or seeing crazy road death figures like in india, or even other european countries.

3500 road deaths a year. in 35 million registered vehicles, statistically with, to pull numbers out of my ass, a mean occupancy of at least 1.2 if you include all buses, family cars, works vans etc. that's one in twelve thousand or more, not even counting pedestrians or cyclists in the count of road users. covering all means and causes, including old folk who simply have a heart attack at the wheel. that's pretty good odds as far as i'm concerned. or, a mean life expectancy of 33 years, if you take that chance once per day...
.... no...... wait...... that's talking 1 in 12000 chance per year. so, more like 12000 years? there are plenty other things that will kill you quicker - like scuba diving, skydiving, or working in nuclear diagnostics (hell, living in Cornwall should do it). All pretty "safe" things, but still far, far more dangerous. Don't see them facing a ban!

number plate tracking vs crime... it should catch some criminals, and help with one or two high profile murder cases that it will be claimed could never otherwise have been solved, but it's usefulness in a large number of the actual criminal acts that are the scourge of this nation is highly questionable, especially vs the implications of tracking every single road user who passes one of these cameras (mind you - 2000? thats not very many, barely enough to cover all four points of every motorway / trunk A-road junction. should be pretty bloody easy to dodge.... until the numbers shoot up out of all sensible proportion). it won't stop a street mugger or rapist, a wild eyed murderer or most serial killers (unless they repeatedly pass APNR cameras, driving between victims), house burglars (escaping on foot), etc etc etc. It may affect the drugs trade.... it may not.

and of course all the control order stuff vs whatever (probably incredibly minor) terrorist threat we face. if anyone's got a dirty bomb i doubt the threat of a control order will stop them, nor are they likely to be caught with their pants far enough down to be trapped by one. incidentally, what's the punishment for breaking the terms of a C.O? I haven't heard it discussed. a smack on the bum? fines? imprisonment? execution for treason? ... house arrest?!

PPPS -------- take a look out for all the bitumen squares and triangles on the road when you're next out, they usually cover power cables and pressure sensors installed since the road was last resurfaced, or even at the same time if it's something required to be only thinly covered. Some of them are traffic light control (mostly to change them to green as you approach at night, or to give priority to the heavier traffic - some, e.g. in bournemouth, to flick green-red-green to enforce an approach slowdown to, say, 15mph... smart, but make you proclaim, "arse!") ....... some are power and data supplies for street lamps, matrix display boards and the like, or even speed cameras...... but what the hell are all the others? there's jillions of them about. keep your eyes to the ground when you're next out and you'll be astounded. following the tracks back to their source is a telling exercise. inductive RFID-type tracking?
and no, it's not cable TV, telephone wiring or anything like that. i live in and have passed through enough areas exhibiting that type of activity to know better. and the stuff is endemic on a lot of motorways, A, B and even unclassified roads.

edit........ fùck. i did it again.

[Krupa]

supposedly the conservatives will remove speed cameras from the roads if they get into power. whether they will make good on this (being the shi'ites that introduced them, after all), or replace them with a similar system to the above, remains to be seen. wonder what the liberal standpoint on all the bullcrapacy is?

Sounds like pre-election bull to me.

They're here to stay sadly.

Do Road Angels etc pick up all types of speed camera?

With Gatsos breeding like rabbits, and a G40 conversion en route this might be a wise investment!

[siilver]

so happpy i live in N.ireland
theres only 4 fixed speed cams in the country