h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Earlier this year, the police moved the position of many Gatso cameras to photograph the front of peoples cars, and their faces rather than the rear, so as to be able to prove who was driving the speeding vehicle. Of course motorcycles don't have a number plate at the front. I heard that a load of mass speedings past Gatsos on motorbikes were planned just to wind the police up when they develop the pictures. Do you know if they ever happened?

If you want to speed, go to france. The laws are so much more reasonable. If you get caught they fine you. If you can't pay the fine, they impound your bike. Easy. None of this points make prizes rubbish in the UK.
Did a run to Le Mans the other month and attained speeds in France, that would have you buried under the prison in the UK.
A word of warning. The french are insane. To this effect they put 30 foot long sleeping policemen across the autoroutes. These are particulary unsettling when travelling at the wrong side of 130 mph.
The effect is as follows:
BOING (up on to sleeping policemann)
What the bloody hell was that!!??
(turn to have a look)
BOING (off the sleeping policeman - whilst facing backwards)
At this point it is perfectly acceptable to shit your pants (I did).

Excellent tale from france sounds like an experience to be viariously lived and not experienced from the first person.

Having never driven in france I can't comment but Germany is an interesting propsition, autobahns as you are undoubtedly aware have no speed limits, but as soon as they end they have a limit and the police have a sort of nazi tendency to nick you for 1 or more kph over the limit, instant fine, huge confiscation & possibly a strip search in the station of you mouth off, still its their country and it has a great driving record.

I have no idea if the forward facing cameras ever got into the real world, but I do know that if you drive at a normal Gatso on the wrong side of the road they still go off, hours of fun for little cost, (hint, try not to do it at night the flashes are bright).

Tried that - works a treat on a bike. The DVLC should have six or seven shots of my cheesey grin by now... Even works at night time...

There's a lot of stuff going around the internet at the moment about a new kind of speed camera in the UK. Maybe this is where the story about rear-facing cameras came from in the original posting. My own posting is going to get a bit long, but stick with it, because for the record I'm going to include the full text of the usual email message that is passed around, and then I'm going to say why I think it's a load of old tosh.

OK, ready?

+++Original message text begins
A new Type of Speed Cameras on M1 & M20 Speedcheck SVVD or SPECS went
online at the end of June on the M1, netting 4,300 offenders in a single day.
The system does not use instantaneous speed like the cameras we're all
familiar with, instead measuring the average speed of every vehicle over a distance of about a mile.
How? By reading your license plates and matching them up camera-to-camera. Kent and Leicestershire police are so impressed with it that systems are being erected in their enforcement areas too. This is a new system which has now entered service after successful trials on the M1 and M20 in the UK.
Speedcheck SVDD (Sureway Video Detection Device) is a system similar in concept to the GATSO, but with a new twist. SVDD deploys cameras at either end of a measured baseline (up to 500 metres) to monitor vehicles 24 hours a day. Using machine vision, vehicle number plates are read, and the precise time of each observation recorded and as a vehicle passes the second camera, the number plate records are matched, and an average speed for the vehicle is calculated. If this is above the trigger speed, then the vehicle's identification is recorded along with it's speed. It is also flashed up on a huge illuminated sign further down the road to embarrass the driver
into slowing down. When triggered, the detection technology used in these cameras automatically records the date, precise time, location and speed of the offending vehicle, along with a full colour image of the front of the vehicle, which clearly records the number plate, make, model and colour of vehicle.
There are five overriding reasons for the habitual speeded to be afraid of this system:
1) It works 24 hours a day, needs no film, uses no flash, and uses no
radar....so bad luck all those of you who think that radar detectors
work.
2) It's been proven to be over 99% accurate in almost all weather
conditions.
3) It doesn't do spot-speed checking. A GATSO can only check the speed of a vehicle within a certain range so the tactic most drivers use now is to slow down for the camera and then speed up again once past it. Speedcheck measures average speed over a known distance. So if you do 60mph under each camera and then speed up to 80mph in between, your average speed is likely to be near 70mph - 10 over the limit imposed - you're nicked. SVDD say this means that the system can impose a far smoother flow of traffic eliminating slow-fast driving that GATSO cameras provoke.
4) Because it's automated, the system is entirely self-sufficient. It's hooked up to the DVLA computers, and can automatically process the fines and send out notices in the post. It's Big Brother. Don't believe for a moment that this technology will only be used to catch speeders.
+++Original message text ends

OK, still with me? Here is why I think it's all a load of dingo's kidneys...
Question 1) Has anybody seen any of these 'huge embarassing signs'?
Question 2) If it uses no flash, how can it take photos (colour ones, mark you) at night?
Question 3) If it uses no film, then the only other technology is CCD. If digital video cameras worked in the dark, they wouldn't need huge great spotlights on them, would they?
Question 4) If it doesn't use radar, how does it know there's a car there to photograph? If it's using edge-recognition technology, then there's some seriously expensive AI in that camera.
Question 5) 'Machine Vision' simply isn't that good yet. The only way the police can figure out the licence plates from current GATSO cameras is by manual image enhancement (their main problem is that the reflection of the flash from the licence plate burns an overexposed image onto the film). It takes NatWest's new ATM two seconds to identify your retinal pattern while you're standing still in a shielded cubby. What chance a dirty moving number plate haring along the road at high speed?
Question 6) How do these cameras communicate with the DVLA computer? The bandwidth required for this task would be awesome. I think we would have noticed if somebody had dug a big optic-fibre trench between London and Swansea.
Question 7) What computer is the DVLA using to do all this processing? (remember: every car passing the cameras has to be matched against every other car AND with the DVLA records). The DVLA computer system is old and clunky (I know this, it's my field), and it does NOT have anywhere near the processing power required for this task. And don't ask me to believe there's an NT server in every camera...
Question 8) No visual imaging system is '99% accurate in all weather conditions'. In fog? In snow?
Question 9) Oh yeah, and why did Sureway (who do exist) tell a reporter from 'Computing' magazine that they hadn't sold any new cameras to forces in the UK?

Convinced? I am. And even if it did exist, it snaps the front of your motorbike, so we bikers are safe. And, yes, I too have triggered GATSO flashes by driving at them the wrong way.

Addendum to my last posting. I've been doing some more research.
The company that makes the camera is called Speedcheck, not Sureway. Sorry, I mistyped.
Anyway, their cameras don't use radar, but they do use infra red ranging and/or induction loops buried in the tarmac. Speedcheck's cameras have been extensively trialed, but have NOT been installed for real anywhere in the UK.
The pictures that they take are digital, and as I said do indeed need spotlights. The illumination is infra red, so how can the photos be full colour, except in daylight?
Speedcheck claim that the cameras can handle up to three vehicles per second, and are 99% accurate in MOST (not ALL) weather conditions. Now that sounds more likely.
Although the DVLA could access the photos at a later date and tell whether the vehicles are taxed, stolen etc, the instant-communication-with DVLA part of the story is I believe based on the cameras in the London anti-IRA ring-of-steel system, which used fixed cameras at checkpoints and could log vehicles in and out of the square mile, requesting details of individual vehicles if they hung around too long. This could return an answer in 3 seconds, but note this is for individual requests, not every vehicle.
So, the story is based on an existing technology (as I said in my original posting), but has been somewhat embellished to make it more scary, and definitely has not been implemented in the UK.
Yet.

Just for info - the "DVLA" computer has not been at DVLA for a few years now. It is in fact a suite of computers, which includes the facility for photos on licences and other things.

The technology regarding reading of number plates is not new - it is proven technology that has been in use by security services for several years, and I have seen it demonstrated. (probably the most boring demo ever - watching cars drive past a check point, then out again, then getting a printout of what cars were still in the "security" area.) It was able to read dirty number plates with no problems, and was even capable of reading broken plates (obviously there has to be a limit)

The Japanese are already using a system of recording car crashes digitally - although it scans every car it only saves the data if it hears a crash. I can imagine that a similar system of scanning every car and only saving the data for the speeders would probably be at the heart of any "speed camera" system

Whether or not such a system actually exists for catching speeding motorists I don't know; I can confirm that most (probably all) of the technology exists to make it feasible.

I can also confirm that motor bikes will set off GATSOs when you are driving towards them!

I didn't read any of that (too long -haven't got all night). Sppeding is great -I don't even change my sppedo cables when they break nowadays (no point -the coorect speed has nothing to do with the Volvo speed).

I have been thinking about speed traps, (British Columbia Canada), and I am wondering if our premier (from India) may have had a trick up his sleeve when he endorsed photo-radar -if he didn't endorse photo radar, they might have gotten a system that works, and that would have been terrible (I would have fouled plugs and high blood-pressure).

I don't like the speed limits... everyone breaks them anyways. All the cops are worried about is liability and meeting their quota.