Anybody have a link to the actual company? I also think they've missed the key use for this. Modelling traffic movements through a space.
Many villages/residential areas suffer from speeding and rat running, but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Community speed watch using ANPR cameras to create an average speed monitored area is HUGE. Even working out people that are using the one way road systems incorrectly helps.
This has huge application across multiple resident associations. To achieve this you need to be able to time synch, know the location of each camera, the shortest 'route' between each camera, and the ability to 'network' each camera.
Where do I invest? Hell I have 16 residents associations that would bite your hands off to get their hands on a cheap traffic profiling system.
Yes especially when and how long people are parked for, couple that with face and/or financial tracking and you can target marketing to people or locations.
Or selling data to repo people / skip tracers. In fact a few of the larger companies that already exist do that and they share data between clients' ANPR (ALPR) devices on their repo / skip tracer work vehicles. The ACLU published a document about the privacy issues around this in 2013. [0]
First time I've heard of "rat running", but am having a hard time seeing the justification for the negative connotation. I can only see it as a more efficient use of the road system.
Just because at some time in the past there was less traffic in your street doesn't mean it won't (or shouldn't) increase in the future.
It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
Rat running is from narrow UK streets, largely residential, being used as through roads rather than access to homes.
The use of traffic aware GPS also encourages more traffic down these roads.
You might think it as efficient but it changes the levels of safety for pedestrians which are usually parents & children at the time of day this is more prevalent.
Blocking off certain streets is exactly what my hometown did. Make it so only certain roads go straight through, others have every third intersection blocked off
I think that it's a reasonable and valid decision for a community to try to restrict through traffic to the main roads such that residential areas can remain quiet/free from exhaust/safe to walk around without all sorts of guardrails and stuff, even if it means less efficiency and more congestion on the main routes.
Why is it okay to push even more of these costs on people around the main route, don't you think that people in all areas should take on their share of these costs.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could be burdensome.
Road networks often follow a hierarchical design - Freeways fed by major roads, major roads fed by smaller roads, smaller roads fed by residential streets.
The larger roads, obviously, are designed for higher traffic speeds and volumes. Features you might see (depending on how large the road is) include more and wider lanes, restrictions on stopping, fewer curves, better visibility, fewer junctions, pedestrians directed to footbridges or dedicated crossings, better lighting, no buildings opening directly onto the roads, and suchlike.
For example, see [1] blue roads being slower/lower capacity, and orange and red being larger, higher speed roads.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could
be burdensome.
Consider this narrow road in London [2] which allows you to bypass the traffic lights between Clerkenwell Road and St John St (admittedly at the cost of taking a sharp corner - I've done this on a motorbike). Replacing the bollards with armco barriers would prevent pedestrians from crossing the road.
(IMHO if people don't want a road used as a through road, they should get the road blocked at one end - rather than expecting a legislative solution - and if they don't want the inconvenience of going around, perhaps they should consider that other road users don't either)
Even with an overall hierarchical design, some places still tend to have fairly major roads with houses on both sides, these are the places I'm concerned about, directing more traffic to these major roads from historically less trafficked roads.
I would think having gaps in the barrier, say every five or ten meters would be sufficient?
I like your humble opinion :) that seems like quite a fair solution all around.
Barriers look ugly and don't solve the problem for:
* pet owners (even cats aside, some dogs often escape the house),
* younger kids who don't have the same safety awareness and often just run off,
* older kids who parents would normally trust to cycle to their friends house.
Barriers also create parking problems:
* how do barriers work when you have houses with driveways?
* and if don't have driveways then how do you park on the street now that you've made it harder to get on and off the pavement?
Barriers legitimise speeding down the road which puts cars parks on the street at greater risk of getting damaged (I've seen this happen far to often along rat runs).
Plus there is also the noise polution problem of living next to a rat run. In fact it's worse than along main roads because you end up with car engines revving as they maneuver around parked cars at speed rather than the constant steady drone of cars going past. You have no idea how annoying this is during the summer when you want windows open and the cars are louder than your own bloody TV!
People who move into a main road do so knowingly and are willing to live with the drawbacks it brings. Though often those kind of houses have longer front gardens so the house is set further back from the road and/or hedges or other noise cancelling greenery (sometimes - not always though). But if you move onto a quieter street you do so because you want a safer and quieter environment. Which is why residents protest against their streets being turned into through-roads
Guardrails are really ugly, and have been shown to increase traffic speeds -- they make drivers feel safer, since they think they no longer need to look for pedestrians.
I think you might be assuming the aim is to maximize traffic flow, or similar. That's not necessarily the aim of a European city's traffic planners -- they may prioritize pedestrian or cyclist safety, child safety or play space, reducing noise, improving bus/tram speeds, or maintaining a historic appearance. This might be for a single road, a small area, or a whole district.
Several of these can reduce overall traffic. If parents don't think it's safe for their children to walk to school, they might drive them instead -- increasing traffic at the worst time for other children. Similarly for private vehicles obstructing buses and trams.
Residential roads are usually a destination where kids play in the road or even become good cycle routes as the speed profile of the roads are designed to enable social cohesion. The original purpose of the road has been 'lost' as congestion has increased making the road attractive.
As to guardrails, they create a significant barrier, not only for, say a pedestrian being slammed into them by a car, but also from a neighbourhood community point of view. The problem is not the people walking and cycling, but the people using it as a convenient cut through.
Sounds good, as long as I get to withhold my taxes in proportion to the number of streets that get blocked off by people who feel they're more entitled to use them than I am.
Transport planning is about developing road networks around specific purposes. So a major route would have a higher speed profile than a residential road. Residential roads with lower speed profiles also sometimes expect children to be playing in them and primarily be destinations.
Filtered streets (placing bollards at one end) are a key tool in rebalancing anti-social behaviour primarily caused by congestion on major routes. It is not changing the function of the road, but enforcing the original designed purpose of the road to be an end destination and not a convenient through route.
It is also significant tax saving. Residential roads are not designed for significant volumes of traffic and can suffer significant damage if they become overused.
I don't think it is necessarily a worse overall outcome, even if the small streets become somewhat less safe.
That's probably because you've never lived on a street designed as a local residential area that has been turned into a rat run. Unfortunately, anyone who has would be in no doubt about that being an overall worse outcome. It undermines the structure of most official traffic planning, sometimes with horrifying results for safety, along with a variety of other undesirable side effects.
Ultimately, all roads are not equal. They are often designed for different purposes, and when they are repurposed for things they were not intended for, very bad things can and do happen. This is a real problem with modern SatNav systems directing large numbers of vehicles along unsuitable routes because they're trying to shave 10s off a journey time, and I imagine laws will be passed regulating such systems before too long (this being easier and more practical than designating all the roads in question as access only and then actually enforcing that law).
The idea is that if a main road has consistently high traffic, some road users will take narrower, less well appointed roads (through villages for example) at unreasonable speeds.
This leads to traffic calming measures as a way to counteract over-use of what should be largely residential traffic. This is also why "Bypasses" became very common - to get high volumes of commuting traffic away from residential areas where possible
But why should it be for residential traffic, if the through traffic is driving within the speed limit? Again, just because the history of a street made it appropriate for relaxed pedestrian use, should that now be in perpetuity?
Maybe a better solution would be to put in barriers.
So, I guess you think that this new driver tracking would be cheaper than traditional obstructions (i.e. speed humps, chicanes, etc...)? I guess it could be, but what are the non obvious secondary and tertiary order costs of tracking all car movement? This seems worrying to me.
Roads are designed and constructed for a certain amount of throughout and vehicle type. The increase in through traffic means greater damages and more expenses.
But how is this different to how the road system has developed from the start? People choose the popular routes by driving on them, then these are the roads that are repaired/upgraded.
I don't know if it's cheaper per vehicle mile to drive on a large road or a small road, but I couldn't see it being very significant, but maybe it is?
These roads are built to a lower standard. If they get more traffic, they will have to be maintained more frequently and/or improved. This is very expensive.
Additionally, there is the safety aspect. It is more than just pedestrians at risk, there are other automobiles and structures to be concerned about. Tertiary streets, for example, probably won't have things like guardrails.
Areas zones as residential should probably not have much through traffic. It is expensive and dangerous. The roads constructed to deal with that traffic are also built to withstand that higher load. Routing the traffic elsewhere will not significantly reduce the maintaining of said roads.
Err... I modeled traffic. Hopefully that explains it. There's some good write-ups as complaints about Waze, if you want a keyword to find more info.
Let's say that a given road has a certain service life, maybe measured in tonne-miles (e.g. a car which weighs 1.5 tonnes and travels a mile on the road would reduce the roads service life by 1.5 tonne-miles) (maybe not a good way to measure it because the damage caused to the road is probably non linear with increasing weight)
What I don't know is if the cost of a small road per tonne-mile service life is any different from the cost of a large road per tonne-mile service life. If the cost difference is negligible then I don't see the problem.
Maybe it is that different parts of the government fund the small roads than the large roads, and the parts of the government that funds the small roads doesn't have the budget to do much road work?
Do heavy vehicles generally use these small streets, it seems like it wouldn't be worth it in a heavy vehicle with most small streets.
You're correct in that it is not linear. The damage increases sigmoidally with weight and is impacted by the number of axles.
The cost differences are huge. A primary road will have been constructed to tolerate the weight and frequency. It's much more expensive to maintain such a road.
In some cases, yes. Maintaining and improving roads will be paid out of different budgets. Federal, State, (sometimes) County, Local Municipality. Tertiary roads are almost certainly out of the local budget.
If it's not expressly prohibited, there's bound to be heavier traffic on these tertiary streets. The heavier vehicles do far more damage.
(There's also safety to be concerned with.)
It's okay to route traffic through these areas when it's an emergency. Occasional use is not going to be a significant impactor. However, with regular use, it's going to result in rapid deterioration.
If you really want to dig into this, here's a link to a study:
Is this the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate from linguistics, applied to road construction?
Increased traffic on a road not meant to take it indicates some unmet demand, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the correct response is to accept the traffic on that road. It may be better to open things up elsewhere.
Finally, there's the problem of externalities. Road traffic has costs to the people nearby, in terms of noise, pollution, and danger. The drivers don't experience those costs, and rarely factor them into the decision of which route to take. Putting a lot of traffic onto a residential road not meant to take it can easily be a net negative.
Maybe it's some limitation of the human brain that causes us to reduce everything to the same recurring roots :)
It may be better to open things up elsewhere, as long as the reason that it is elsewhere is not because elsewhere had a weaker residents association.
I've seen the paradox you mentioned a few times, but I think it is like a lot of paradoxes, interesting but rare and not very relevant most of the time.
It may be a net negative for the people on that street, but overall, I'm not so sure.
I guess it's a fundamental division: do you react, or do you command? But something about this particular conversation reminded me strongly of how it's discussed in linguistics.
It is more a problem of large volumes of traffic using roads that were never designed for this purpose.
In the UK, it is fairly common for people to have to park on the street rather than have their own driveways. Some local authorities also require each household to have 2 or 3 refuse bins and, because homes were not designed to accommodate them, these are also often placed at the roadside.
All of this is just about manageable most of the time but imagine the chaos when you get 100's of cars using your street as a short cut twice a day?
Also, your typical 'rat-runner' tends to be a bad tempered person with a tendency to drive over the speed limit (typically 30 mph in the UK, which is quite fast enough for a residential street). Needless to say, if you are unlucky enough to have to live on a rat-run you can expect your car to be damaged two or three times a year.
And, of course, the guilty party always drives off without reporting it.
Oh, and if you have kids - you can just imagine!
Furthermore, the supposed efficiency saving is, at best, negligible since a busy rat-run becomes congested much more readily than the major road everyone is avoiding.
I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
Maybe it is also in your best interests if the street is modified to accommodate modern use cases.
You're under the impression the government does that sort of thing in the us (modify roads to address demand). In my experience that is largely an artifact of history now.
> I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
I wouldn't assume there's an overall efficiency gain. That's part of the problem: in many cases, a shortcut that would work if a few cars used it causes problems (jammed intersections, etc.) if too many cars try to take advantage.
Someone who knows graph theory more than I do could comment, but more generally I don't think there's any guarantee that a situation where every vehicle uses a greedy algorithm will result in overall greatest efficiency. I could swear there was an article on this within the last year but I cannot find it.
Imagine people start driving through a park. Pedestrians and bicyclists complain. Drivers respond: This is just a more efficient use of space. If you prevent cars from driving into the park, they'll just cause more traffic along the arterials--that's not fair.
Streets are not fungible "vehicular transportation widgets." They serve many purposes. In many places, relatively quiet neighborhood streets serve as unofficial (but sometimes official) transportation infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as spaces for community. They can only serve this purpose if they are low-traffic. Taking your kids on errands on a cargo bike, or letting them walk to school or to a neighbor's house, or letting them play basketball on the street, or teaching them how to ride a bike--all possible on a low-traffic neighborhood street, all very ill-advised on a high-traffic one.
Higher traffic on these streets expands the space available for motor vehicles, but it literally destroys transportation infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians. As someone who lives on a major arterial but commutes (by bike, with kids) on quiet neighborhood streets, I strongly support the diversion of traffic to the former.
Those roads can barely handle the traffic they get because they are so narrow, so people using them at speed to avoid more suitable roads is a problem. It's:
* less safe for residents (inherent to more traffic, but especially so given how close the entryways are to the road), and, for better or worse, there may be children playing in the street
* makes it more dangerous to park there (risk of damage from passing vehicles)
* less convenient to park if you have to negotiate heavy traffic
* adds unwanted noise - typical residential traffic volumes/patterns aren't too bad, but I wouldn't want heavy traffic passing by just outside my front room.
Its negative connotation is well-earned IMO (especially as _anecdotally_ many of the drivers looking to take advantage of such routes drive at excessive speeds for the road conditions). In a lot of cases, the volume of traffic on those roads SHOULDN'T increase - they just aren't designed for it.
I'd also question if it is actually more efficient - with how narrow these sorts of streets are, and the likelihood of people wanting to park etc., you aren't going to get a smooth flow of traffic as people try to negotiate round each other.
> It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
It's mostly a term used where there is a larger road in the vicinity, but people use the residential streets to avoid congestion or take a marginally shorter route. It's not really a case of shuffling the traffic off onto other residential streets.
Among other things, it pushes traffic from commercial corridors (where noise is expected) onto residential ones. Then you get people leaning on their horns right outside your window all evening when you're trying to concentrate on work or are exhausted and just want to sleep - because the way the lights are timed on the side streets means that not everyone makes it through the light (or when the traffic on the arteries is heavy, nobody on the side street makes it through the light).
> but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Interesting, this isn't my experience. I think this is a size issue. In major cities probably. Out here in the 'burbs, I call the police about a speeder, and there's an officer with a radar gun out within the hour. Speeding tickets are nice funding for the department. Add a reckless driving on there and you got a nice doozy.
What happens more often than not though is you get two really annoying speed humps installed if enough calls about it come through.
I'm actually in the process of building exactly what you're describing and would love to chat. Would you mind shooting me an email? naeem.tee@gmail.com
Also unless I'm misunderstanding it doesn't seems to be capturing the speed of vehicles either, although I wonder if doing that accurately would require more precise mounting and calibration.
I was wondering if you could identify these 'sensors' somehow, but it looks like they're using cell networks, which as far as I understand means there is no plaintext unique identifier.
Does this mean something similar could be done with tracking of people via facial recognition? (Or is that different somehow?).
It's just a camera in a box, hooked up to some image recognition software. The convicted thief would have been caught just as trivially with a regular security camera.
So, the answer to your last question is "yes", same as with any other camera.
That is the scalable solution, but I get by just fine with a trail cam pointed at my driveway. It takes 5 minutes a month to scroll through manually and check that most cars are me, my wife, or family, and then check any others.
Are there any privacy guards that can be applied to number plates that are effective in protecting you from being tracked?
I’m immediately reminded of Jon Ronson’s article ‘Who killed Richard Cullen?’[1] where companies such as Experian sell relational geo-data on people to whatever companies want to use that data to target and potentially manipulate people.
It depends on where you live. Some places have the privacy built-in.
In Canada anybody can get the name associated with a plate, but it costs ~$30 CAD and your name and drivers license number is verified and stored to do so. If you want the address you must be a licensed private investigator (~$350 CAD course and ~$80 CAD test) or police, again the access is logged.
In the UK you need to write to the ministry for even a name, not sure of the level of difficulty or likelihood of the request being granted.
In the USA, it depends on the state. Many you can get freely and anonymously from a 3rd party database.
There are LCD license plate frames which go opaque/transparent when powered, for example http://www.ghostplate.com/mechanics/ (first google result for "lcd license plate frame"). Of course they're Very Illegal to use while driving.
Bike racks! I thought about doing an ALPR project for a while which got me to start looking at plates. I always laugh when I see a bike rack that totally obscures the view.
Yeah I’ve noted that quite often, similarly on motorbikes I’ve seen people ride with flip-up number plates operated by a lever or cable on the side of the bike that when actions - flips the plate horizontal so it cannot (easily) be read.
A great addition to this would be radar to track vehicle speeds. In my neighborhood we have an issue with jerks doing 50mph down our street(speed limit is 25mph) to bypass a traffic light on an adjacent street. Kids are often out and we've had a few near misses. Most of the offenders live nearby and I'd love a way to shame them into slowing down. The city is unable and unwilling to do any enforcement or install traffic calming on our street so we don't have any other options except moving.
Would you need radar? If you have a camera pointed at the street, couldn't you use the distance traveled in successive frames to calculate a speed? If you already have one camera set up to record the tags, a second one should be easy to capture the speed.
10 year veteran of the ITS industry here. It's not trivial to do camera speed recognition. You need to do ranging in addition to the video detection to know how far the vehicle is from the camera to accurately measure the speeds using movement between frames. These systems cost in the $10,000+ range, while a k-band doppler can be had for around $500. It's a no brainer to stick with the 1940's doppler technology ;)
I wonder if you could even use road markings or kerb stones as your calibration to save the effort of measuring things out.
I'm admittedly rather unqualified in this area (I don't even know what the ITS industry is!) but I have experience in estimating distances from video and calculating speeds from pixel displacement (particle image velocimetry) and at first pass it seems to me this would be a fairly straightforward problem to solve.
Obviously radar or lidar would be preferable but a quick search for "OpenCV speed estimation" shows people having success with simple single <$50 camera setups.
I'd use two infrared laser LEDs on a PCB with a low-res-but-high-speed infrared light detector, and set up a retroreflector across the street.
If the LEDs are 10cm apart, and parallel to the street, and left dot vanishes 7.45645 ms after the right dot, then something was moving through the beams from right to left at 30 miles per hour (13.4112 m/s). If right dot vanishes 4.06716 ms after left dot, something was moving left to right at 55 mph (24.5872 m/s).
You can even get an estimate of vehicle length and acceleration if you watch for the dots to reappear.
The frame rates and resolutions of most cameras aren't great for precisely estimating speed. You would need a high-speed camera, which is wasted on a surveillance application. So you just use two cameras, one that sees 16 infrared pixels with an ultra high frame rate, and one that sees many RGB pixels at 24 fps.
> The frame rates and resolutions of most cameras aren't great for precisely estimating speed.
How good do you think the numbers would be? For example, the speed limit on my road is 25 mph but I know people routinely drive through at 40 mph. Would a camera system be good enough to record, say, 30 mph with error bars equal to +/- 5 mph?
If you can set up clear distance markers 100m apart on the road itself, a regular surveillance camera set up with its line-of-sight perpendicular to the road could probably estimate speeds between 5 and 80 mph with at least 1 mph precision, and adding some image processing software could probably give you 0.1 mph precision or better.
Oblique views, curved roads, unclear markers, or even differently colored cars could produce false results, or no results at all.
It may be enough to convince your local cop shop to set up a radar trailer on your street for a few days, but you're not going to be convicting anyone of reckless driving with it.
I disagree with you regarding resolution and frame rates, I don't see why you would need a high speed camera. Something like a raspberry pi camera would be perfectly sufficient for this, assuming you still just want to get someone's speed to within say +/- 1mph to shame them, as in the original comment.
Set up your RPi camera about 20m from the road, with it's FOV that'll give you about 20 m of road coverage. Rule of thumb in my world is that the items of interest should not move more than 1/4 of window width between frames. So that's 5m, to move 5m between frames at 30Hz you'd need to be doing about 300 mph. More realistically the car might be doing 25m/s giving you an inter-frame displacement of 0.8m ~130px. If that's too little for your software to register just up the inter-frame time.
You only need high-speed if you're mounting a device immediately adjacent to the road with a low-resolution light sensor.
An ordinary surveillance camera certainly can estimate speed, especially with good software, but a dedicated device would likely give a better performance to price ratio or performance to power ratio. Maybe I'm just too old, and still think that a RPi and enough resolution for a human to actually discern an image is overkill, because I'm used to computing power and image resolution being expensive.
But then again, if you're already using that setup to read license plate numbers, you're not actually starting from zero. The marginal effort to estimate speed on top of that is likely less than a purpose-built device.
The most difficult aspect is the "getting the speed legally binding". As much as many a police officer would love to write a ticket based on your setup, little will become of it without solid formal proof of its accuracy.
It doesn't have to involve the police or courts to effect a change. If somebody asked me to slow down because I was driving at 40 mph down our 25 mph street, I would probably do it.
Have you called local police? My neighbourhood had the same issue during some recent construction that lead to a street becoming a main thoroughfare. The neighbourhood committee requested assistance from police and they placed one of those radar/speed sign on trailers and also had more photo radar trucks set up.
Hey! I'm building something that's pretty much exactly this, and I'm curious if your neighbourhood has some kind of community watchgroup that would want to try prototype something like this?
Since the OP of this thread is new, they're probably trolling us, but giving benefit of the doubt for a moment, you have no right to privacy on public roads. Whether you paid for them or not is irrelevant. You could make that argument for state action, but not private. Just because you paid your taxes for that road doesn't stop me from recording your license plate, description, time and date of every time I've seen your car, the race, gender, etc. of your passengers, and posting that to the internet.
In my country it's illegal since communism was overthrown. I'm not discussing the current legal status though. People should not be tracked on public property - property built from their own money.
This has nothing to do with who paid for what. Case in point: children, the elderly, or foreigners should enjoy the same right to privacy, even if they aren't (currently) paying taxes. It's not about property rights, it's about a modicum of dignity.
I'm talking about contributions because I want to make an easy distinction between public and private property. Everyone should have a right to do whatever they want on their own property as long as they don't break the non-aggression principle.
Just being the status quo isn't an argument for the legality of such a database. It's true that (most) recordings and data collection in public are currently legal. But the law was created at a time when there were natural limits to the aggregation and connection of such data.
If new technology drastically changes what is possible with such data, it's up to society to change the law. Don't want the whole world to have access to your location data 20+ years back? Find enough people who agree, and it won't happen.
There are many countries (i. e. all of Europe) where such a database would already be illegal, and I'm having a hard time thinking of the possible downsides.
Sure, there's a sort of abstract notion of freedom at stake. But any real harm would require some slippery-slope argumentation. At the same time, there is a direct, obvious, and (in my opinion) rather strong loss of freedom that comes with such a breach of privacy.
All those defending those neo-nazis in Charlottesville and their right to assembly should oppose something like this. Because with such a database, there'd be pretty good lists of everyone who participated in any such rallies in the last decade online right now.
Want to keep your sexual orientation, religion, or political affiliation from your prospective employer? No longer possible. Happened to be in the same place as some criminal more than statistics would suggest? You're now a suspect. Etc etc.
I don't expect privacy, but I do expect anonymity.
When I am out and about, I expect to be the background NPC labeled as "villager", until I do something that would give someone adequate reason to identify me.
Another big brother style invention. Wonderful. I'm sure they won't sell this info to the government at any point.
My biggest issue, though, is the inequitable terms of tracking. If you live in a given neighborhood then you can opt out. Great. That gives those people preference. And treats everyone else as lesser citizens because they don't live there. We're talking about public spaces so there really shouldn't be any inequity. I think the company behind this sees the opt out ability for locals as the only way to make this palatable to people on a large scale.
Also, how is "neighborhood" defined? I assume it's by them and has some radius or something like that. And I'm also fairly certain to opt out would require me creating an account and providing my name, address, and car info (at minimum).
You want to record everything in public spaces? Fine, the law says you can do that so I respect that right. But that does not mean I am a fan of this by any stretch of the imagination. I feel like the real reason for this is something more nefarious they have planned later on - it could really be a way to finally track the remaining untrackables in our society who may be older and not have or use all the fancy tech we have today that tracks everything. It could also include people like myself that go to reasonable but not insane methods to circumvent tracking methods simply because I don't like to be tracked. There's really nothing I can do if they see me leave my house and drive to my friend's place and hang out there for 5 hours. Since I don't use social media they can't really connect that he and I are close friends without a tool like this. They can now make that association, which was previously near impossible to achieve.
The government already uses these devices. First, there's the ever-increasing use of license plate readers on patrol cars. These have spawned all over the place, not just on the cruisers, but also fixed points. Second, if you've ever driven on the Dulles Access Road from DC to Dulles Airport, sensors pickup the bluetooth ID of your tire pressure monitor, and other SIGINT/MASINT details. More cities are using SIGINT/MASINT technologies to gather all of that data.
I can't tell you how I know this, but drive just about anywhere within 20 miles of DC and everything about you that is possible is processed, cataloged, cross-references, and stored.
I had never heard of anything like this! Thank you very much for this information.
Luckily for me I drive an old car (definitely pre-bluetooth for sure) so that part wouldn't apply to me, but the increasing use of plate readers applies to everyone, everywhere.
There's an old book you might find interesting called "No Place to Hide" by Robert O'Harrow. If you do read it, try to keep in mind that it was written in 2004, and then consider how much innovation is likely to have taken place since then.
I cannot tell you where I know this from, but the newest top secret satellites launched recently from Florida will cover the whole US terrain with infrared scanners. Now, given every person has a different size of veins running under their skin in slightly different ways, there are no two people with the same configuration of blood circulation system. So unless you are wearing metal armor 24/7, you are being tracked and cataloged of when and how long you been.
So please - update your tires to let your car know and to notify you when your pressure is low. It might safe your life!
pc86: would you really bet, or you are just bullshitting me?
We could definitely drive up to Las Vegas and make a bonding, lawful bet. But I need to know how much $ you have on your mind, so I'm not wasting my time here.
I assume "mental check" would be done by physician selected by you. But as long as she/he has expertise in the field and is licensed in the USA, I'm fine with that.
You're not wrong but there are aftermarket direct TPMS that utilize Bluetooth to alert an App on your phone. These aren't very common and it's far more likely that someone is just tracking unique Bluetooth devices and not specifically targeting this very uncommon application of it.
Loosely related...
There are two types if TPMS, direct and indirect.
Direct TMPS use a battery powered sensor on either side of the valve stem to monitor tire pressure and transmit it wirelessly to the car's computer. They're very precise but rely on an expensive battery powered sensor on the valve stem, because of this they are less reliable, prone to failure, damage and tamper. You can identify direct TPMS by the green valve stem caps on a car.
Indirect monitoring leverages the tire speed sensor of the ABS or ESC systems to monitor drag induced by a tire with low pressure, it's not precise but it's accurate and far more reliable. And quite clever IMO.
The NHTSA instituted rule 126 requiring ESC on most vehicles, since TPMS and ABS are subsets of technology necessary for ESC, you should see all three features offered on most new cars today.
There are also the commercial companies which run vans with cameras everywhere to systematically regularly record license plates/locations; this is then sold to advertisers, hedge funds, skiptracers, PIs etc.
Snooping on tire pressure monitors has been demonstrated.[1][2] Range is about 10m with a simple antenna, 40m with a good directional one. Each tire sensor has a permanent 32-bit ID. Tire sensors only emit about once every 60-90 seconds (faster if the tire pressure is low), and only when the vehicle is moving (so the battery isn't drained while the car is parked.) Some can be triggered to transmit by an external LF signal, and this is done at vehicle start-up to get an initial tire check. That mechanism, though, is manufacturer-specific.
As a surveillance system, this has only modest potential. It would be useful to pair this with license plate readers, and notice cars whose license plate/tire ID relationships have changed.
It's probably more useful for taking inventory at car rental lots and finding abandoned/overtime cars in big parking lots. There might be commercial potential in this. Anybody with a big fleet could use something that checks their vehicles as they go in and out.
Honest question to your statement:
"It would be useful to pair this with license plate readers, and notice cars whose license plate/tire ID relationships have changed."
I have a separate set of Winter wheels which obviously come with their own pressure sensors - so my licence plate/tyre sensor ID pairing will change at least twice a year(I also got a flat once and put a single winter wheel on - what happens then? surely you will get 2 different IDs for one car?).
That's a fair expectation and can be filtered out: you can roughly expect 1 plate to match multiple set of tires. When the same set of tires (or 3 or them) get matched to a different license plate, that can be flagged as suspicious.
Pressure sensors connect to tires to do their job but usually stay with wheels. While not common it's certainly both possible and legal (and sometimes happens) to switch wheels to a different car.
Whether or not the gov uses these is irrelevant. With your logic, how about I put a camera on your house and snap photos of everybody that goes in an out of the door? Is that OK since the government could already do that if they wanted?
Then what if I take these images and post them online with your name and address? It's all public information and data captured outside of your house. It should then be fine for me to take this public data and sell it to an aggregator, say Facebook and Amazon, right?
In the US there are neighborhoods which are not freehold property, the owners are members in a Home Owner's Association (HOA). HOA's have significant powers, and are responsible for many things in the property, sometimes even roads and water.
Gated communities fall into this class. So this camera would be targeting the HOA market, but not gated communities which have gates, locks and guards.
Personally, I don't like HOAs, and I don't like private neighborhoods. To the point that I refuse to look at property with an HOA.
I also would never purchase an HOA property. They wield far too much power over what you can and cannot do with what you own and you can never leave the HOA as it is linked to the deed.
You cannot leave the HOA, but you can get yourself elected to the leadership and systematically destroy all of its enforcement powers from the inside.
But this obviously takes more effort than simply buying property that isn't subject to a HOA in the first place.
Your state court system may also be able to clear restrictive covenants from your property if the HOA makes any mistakes in enforcement. That is highly dependent on your neighbors, so success is by no means guaranteed.
A lot of HOAs can be brought to heel by threatening to erect antennas on your property, for the purposes of amateur radio communications and reception of broadcast signals. No covenant restricting those types of antennas is enforceable in the US, and most of the HOAs know it, or will know it shortly after consulting with a lawyer.
I feel like the real reason for this is something more nefarious they have planned later on
I would bet money that they will be using this system for mapping and tracking for autonomous cars driving the last mile. If you want to bootstrap that localized map, then you need to have a use case that is not driverless cars currently.
The government already does this, in some areas on a blanket basis. This device puts the same data into the hands of citizens, evening the score. From that point of view it's a great thing.
Yes, they will not sell it now. But once everyone is into it thinking ahhh its a great idea and a great tool and share their private/public data though this. Then, these companies will turn around and sell your data to monetize on them which is the first thing any company is going to do.
It's absolutely legal. Anything in public you can photograph, record, monitor, etc. A different question to ask is: Should this be legal when certain data points, such as a license plate number, are required to be public, and the state forces you to disclose these.
In various other parts of the world, if this system works as described in the news articles then it's probably going to get eaten alive, possibly along with anyone deploying it.
I'm not so sure. It's legal to walk next to somebody. It's not legal to stalk somebody. The latter is just a more elaborate version of the former.
A similar thing can be said about taking photographs (which is legal) versus recording people's behavior in a database (akin to drag-net surveillance, which we do not trust the government with, let alone companies or individuals).
> which we do not trust the government with, let alone companies or individuals
Actually, I think it's legal for individuals or companies but not for the government. For example, the government can't install surveillance cameras in a shopping mall, but the mall owner can. The government can't watch people shop in stores, but stores are installing cameras to track how people move through the store, what items they smile at, and what they finally buy.
I was listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about a future where companies will drive around, pick up peoples trash, then process it to build a profile of the household. Because trash is fair game once you drop it off at the curb, they claimed there was nothing stopping anybody from doing this.
It was a very brief segment and I couldn't find it, but the idea stood out to me. I could totally see somebody thinking about this - thinking about how much it costs to dispose of a bag of garbage plus the cost to process it compared to the value of the data inside. I could see a company like Amazon figuring out which neighborhoods have their best customers and wanting that data to figure out how to sell them even more stuff.
It's simultaneously fascinating and abhorrent to me.
IMO this is the kind of AI hazard that Musk et al are decrying. Imagine if you could pay someone astronomically small amounts of money (0.05 USD/day) to do some menial task like this. Imagine now that their work would be very consistent and pretty good quality. The entire world is filled with "the obscurity of mundane activity" for which it makes no sense to track. But there is a utility to tracking this mundane activity (deterring/investigating crime in the case of this device). And as you point out there's a huge downside to tracking/mining this mundane activity.
It is a valuable, good thing that anyone's activity in public can be summarized, written down, recorded on video/audio. This way we can punish criminals and corrupt officials.
The protections from the US Bill of Rights don't shield us from law enforcement doing the same. In the past this has been (mostly?) a net benefit. If you commit crimes in public or leave evidence of a crime in public and it's found by investigators, it does not constitute "unreasonable search" of the government.
Should this be legal? It's a tough call IMO. I recognize the enormous potential for abuse, but this seems more beneficial than harmful. I would not be surprised if we cross a threshold where the amount of information gathered has more potential for harm than good in the next decade or two.
This reminds me of the Burbclaves in the novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. Looking at the exclusive neighborhoods and subdivisions around D.C. I can totally see this becoming a selling point, along with the gates, armed guards, etc. that already exist. Tie these sensors into a network and suddenly a wrong turn can get you put on a neighborhood "watch list" across the city.
Why does YC invest in anything? I think it's because they see the potential to make money. I believe you are correct, there are YC ethical rules, but I don't think Sam and company have any qualms about violating those ethics for themselves, or even holding themselves to any ethics at all. If it makes money, they invest. Only when something bad happens do ethics suddenly become an issue.
IanCal, sorry you feel this way. Our goal is simply to help police do their job. Today, only 13% of crime is solved due to lack of evidence. We are trying to help drive that number to 100% and eliminate crime in our neighborhoods.
What type of crime is your main target? Do you store video in addition to plate numbers? How accurate are your speed estimates at oblique angles?
I think you are getting some pushback because a lot of neighborhood watch groups have a reputation for looking out for "wrong looking people." The Trayvon Martin case surely didn't help, either.
Also, crime in the US is an all time low, but perception of crime is at an all time high. This is good for your product, but not for our society.
As if pockets of sheltered NIMBYs just existing wasn't bad enough, let's now make tools for them to enforce their own mini-police state for their already-gated neighborhoods!
The Big One™ that hits and sends all of Silicon Valley crashing into the Pacific can't come soon enough...
I've sometimes pondered what it would be like to have something like Sensor's license plate tracking, but using a car-mounted dashcam. Even with just one in every few thousand cars equipped, you could probably get pretty comprehensive location tracking of where particular cars were at a given time. There would be many uses for such a capability, both positive and negative to society.
> It doesn't track who is driving in your neighbourhood, it tracks who owns the car driving in your neighbourhood. A not so subtle difference.
Actually, it tracks who is the registered owner of the license plate numbers read off the vehicles driving in your area, which is subtly different from even what you describe.
For the US, you can register a "somewhat anonymous" LLC in places like New Mexico, then register your vehicle in the name of the LLC.
Unwinding who really owns the vehicle is still possible for government, though still not quick or automated. It would make it very difficult for private efforts like this one.
I'm interested in who owns the data after it is collected. Is it the company's or does it below to the person who is paying the $50/year? My hunch is that the company will retain rights over the data collected and it can become another source of income for them over time.
Define "the neighborhood". I personally don't know more than three or four neighbors in my apartment complex. Who specifically is it then? I tend to believe you actually meant to type 'police precinct'.
I applaud your sense of civic duty, but having a complete panopticon of all outside activities for an unobtainable goal of 100% seems absurd.
You keep using the word “neighborhood” as if it referred to a legal entity with a defined authority structure that can make decisions and own property. This is generally not the case, so it is apparent that this is being used as a sloppy, PR-friendly term for something else, like maybe an HOA. What specifically do you mean when you say “neighborhood”?
"The data is only made available to 'neighbourhood leaders'"
This is going to go over big in religious communities. Control-freak religions such as Scientology and Haredi Judaism will go for this. Both already operate sizable camera networks in areas where they have power.
Oh goodness, and polygamist groups. TLC has an interesting show called escaping polygamy, where a few people (formerly in groups) help others escape. They're routinely followed when they drive into places like Colorado city.
It would be so easy to track everyone in those cities. And that would really up the level of danger to those residents.
I could actually consider such system for my neighborhood, but only if it is off-line (i.e. nobody can access the data, unless I decide to deposit some during a crime investigation). A bit like a ATM security camera.
I would not mind to have the data being discarded after X days for instance. Since it is supposed to be used to make a case of crime, if no crime was reported there is no need to keep the data.
Also, they would have to make sure that the data collected is receivable by the justice system. Otherwise it would be pointless.
> we let the neighborhood decide who has access and how access is granted.
“Neighborhoods” generally aren't legal entities that you can deal with this way. When you say “neighborhood” here, are you talking about an homeowners association (which is a very different thing than a “neighborhood”) or...what, exactly?
It was going to happen regardless, but it makes me deeply cynical to see this infrastructure going up in the folksy tone of "neighborhood safety." I guess to justify erecting yet another component of the massive surveillance apparatus, you have to have a startup-ey landing page and cool logo. I would prefer to see this announced on a dingy government website, or even signs on every corner stating "all movement is tracked" installed by bureaucratic decree. At least then we'd be honest with what we're creating.
These types of scanners already exist in your neighborhood, and probably have for a couple of years. The next time you're near a police car, look at the trunk. There will probably be three or four cameras pointing to the adjacent lanes. They look like this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_y7NgL5zbq3U/TER5EIjZ20I/AAAAAAAAAt...
A bit off-topic, but reminds me of the creative workarounds people tried when automated ticketing via speed cameras were first introduced in Arizona. One loophole was that if they weren't able to reasonably identify you in the traffic photo then the ticket wouldn't stand up in court. Some guy kept deliberately speeding by these cameras wearing a monkey mask:
This is sketchy. The desire for absolute security can only end in a total surveillance state.
This kind of surveillance makes a mockery of the concept of privacy and anonymity. Nor only is data collected but it is stored enabling profiling.
The whole point of rule of law is to find common ground to temper out of control self interest. This is akin to stalking people going about their daily lives and should be illegal.
Why is YC supporting this. Why is anyone supporting this? Unless you take a stand minute to minute surveillance of everyone's lives will become the new normal.
These are great ideas to monetize now. As it grows, it will be the same as its been happening with the big companies, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc., where law enforcement will force to acquire these data and naturally as its a company which owns it, its going to turn up to be used to scrutinize anyone in the name of security etc., and privacy at all levels will be basically sold for money. These guys start snooping around and project its a great tool for safety. True there could be a fraction of safety around this. But at the end of the day its just about money and becomes another surveillance mechanism to monitor everyone which is bullshit and nonsense.
I like the false pretense for "neighborhood protection", when really this is a lowering bar for plate collection likely for more intrusive advertising. Even if you were able to pay cash or epay system obfuscate store purchases at a retailer, they could still nab your plates.
Really, if a criminal were to drive in and loot a house in your neighborhood, what self respecting criminal wouldn't use dummy plates or a lifted car to commit robberies and at least some sort of identity obfuscation. Let's not pretend this is a noble invention.
While out in public you may not have a right to privacy, there's certainly a level of general anonymity that most of us assume. While such plate reading technology has existed for some time, now it could be easily deployed by a overbearing ex-lover to know if/when person is home or worse, a hate group outside an abortion clinic.
File this under war on privacy to further usher in a technocratic hellscape future.
Won't take long for plate data from this highly ethical YC startup to be used as blackmail/extortion material against someone who gets caught parking in the wrong driveway while their wife/husband is out of town.
197 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadMany villages/residential areas suffer from speeding and rat running, but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Community speed watch using ANPR cameras to create an average speed monitored area is HUGE. Even working out people that are using the one way road systems incorrectly helps.
This has huge application across multiple resident associations. To achieve this you need to be able to time synch, know the location of each camera, the shortest 'route' between each camera, and the ability to 'network' each camera.
Where do I invest? Hell I have 16 residents associations that would bite your hands off to get their hands on a cheap traffic profiling system.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070694
[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...
Just because at some time in the past there was less traffic in your street doesn't mean it won't (or shouldn't) increase in the future.
It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
The use of traffic aware GPS also encourages more traffic down these roads.
You might think it as efficient but it changes the levels of safety for pedestrians which are usually parents & children at the time of day this is more prevalent.
It could be that installing barriers at some of the more dangerous points is the most optimal solution?
Why is it okay to push even more of these costs on people around the main route, don't you think that people in all areas should take on their share of these costs.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could be burdensome.
The larger roads, obviously, are designed for higher traffic speeds and volumes. Features you might see (depending on how large the road is) include more and wider lanes, restrictions on stopping, fewer curves, better visibility, fewer junctions, pedestrians directed to footbridges or dedicated crossings, better lighting, no buildings opening directly onto the roads, and suchlike.
For example, see [1] blue roads being slower/lower capacity, and orange and red being larger, higher speed roads.
Consider this narrow road in London [2] which allows you to bypass the traffic lights between Clerkenwell Road and St John St (admittedly at the cost of taking a sharp corner - I've done this on a motorbike). Replacing the bollards with armco barriers would prevent pedestrians from crossing the road.(IMHO if people don't want a road used as a through road, they should get the road blocked at one end - rather than expecting a legislative solution - and if they don't want the inconvenience of going around, perhaps they should consider that other road users don't either)
[1] http://www.stgeorgenp.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Prop... [2] https://goo.gl/ETDx3h
I would think having gaps in the barrier, say every five or ten meters would be sufficient?
I like your humble opinion :) that seems like quite a fair solution all around.
* pet owners (even cats aside, some dogs often escape the house),
* younger kids who don't have the same safety awareness and often just run off,
* older kids who parents would normally trust to cycle to their friends house.
Barriers also create parking problems:
* how do barriers work when you have houses with driveways?
* and if don't have driveways then how do you park on the street now that you've made it harder to get on and off the pavement?
Barriers legitimise speeding down the road which puts cars parks on the street at greater risk of getting damaged (I've seen this happen far to often along rat runs).
Plus there is also the noise polution problem of living next to a rat run. In fact it's worse than along main roads because you end up with car engines revving as they maneuver around parked cars at speed rather than the constant steady drone of cars going past. You have no idea how annoying this is during the summer when you want windows open and the cars are louder than your own bloody TV!
People who move into a main road do so knowingly and are willing to live with the drawbacks it brings. Though often those kind of houses have longer front gardens so the house is set further back from the road and/or hedges or other noise cancelling greenery (sometimes - not always though). But if you move onto a quieter street you do so because you want a safer and quieter environment. Which is why residents protest against their streets being turned into through-roads
I think you might be assuming the aim is to maximize traffic flow, or similar. That's not necessarily the aim of a European city's traffic planners -- they may prioritize pedestrian or cyclist safety, child safety or play space, reducing noise, improving bus/tram speeds, or maintaining a historic appearance. This might be for a single road, a small area, or a whole district.
Several of these can reduce overall traffic. If parents don't think it's safe for their children to walk to school, they might drive them instead -- increasing traffic at the worst time for other children. Similarly for private vehicles obstructing buses and trams.
Heaven forbid that people get where they're going in less time and with greater safety.
If the city wants to use a road for arterial traffic, they should upgrade it to handle the task.
As to guardrails, they create a significant barrier, not only for, say a pedestrian being slammed into them by a car, but also from a neighbourhood community point of view. The problem is not the people walking and cycling, but the people using it as a convenient cut through.
Filtered streets (placing bollards at one end) are a key tool in rebalancing anti-social behaviour primarily caused by congestion on major routes. It is not changing the function of the road, but enforcing the original designed purpose of the road to be an end destination and not a convenient through route.
It is also significant tax saving. Residential roads are not designed for significant volumes of traffic and can suffer significant damage if they become overused.
That's probably because you've never lived on a street designed as a local residential area that has been turned into a rat run. Unfortunately, anyone who has would be in no doubt about that being an overall worse outcome. It undermines the structure of most official traffic planning, sometimes with horrifying results for safety, along with a variety of other undesirable side effects.
Ultimately, all roads are not equal. They are often designed for different purposes, and when they are repurposed for things they were not intended for, very bad things can and do happen. This is a real problem with modern SatNav systems directing large numbers of vehicles along unsuitable routes because they're trying to shave 10s off a journey time, and I imagine laws will be passed regulating such systems before too long (this being easier and more practical than designating all the roads in question as access only and then actually enforcing that law).
This leads to traffic calming measures as a way to counteract over-use of what should be largely residential traffic. This is also why "Bypasses" became very common - to get high volumes of commuting traffic away from residential areas where possible
Maybe a better solution would be to put in barriers.
The problem is that through traffic often drives above the speed limit.
B) If speed is the issue, that's fine - address the speed. Increased traffic is not the issue in this case.
I don't know if it's cheaper per vehicle mile to drive on a large road or a small road, but I couldn't see it being very significant, but maybe it is?
Additionally, there is the safety aspect. It is more than just pedestrians at risk, there are other automobiles and structures to be concerned about. Tertiary streets, for example, probably won't have things like guardrails.
Areas zones as residential should probably not have much through traffic. It is expensive and dangerous. The roads constructed to deal with that traffic are also built to withstand that higher load. Routing the traffic elsewhere will not significantly reduce the maintaining of said roads.
Err... I modeled traffic. Hopefully that explains it. There's some good write-ups as complaints about Waze, if you want a keyword to find more info.
What I don't know is if the cost of a small road per tonne-mile service life is any different from the cost of a large road per tonne-mile service life. If the cost difference is negligible then I don't see the problem.
Maybe it is that different parts of the government fund the small roads than the large roads, and the parts of the government that funds the small roads doesn't have the budget to do much road work?
Do heavy vehicles generally use these small streets, it seems like it wouldn't be worth it in a heavy vehicle with most small streets.
The cost differences are huge. A primary road will have been constructed to tolerate the weight and frequency. It's much more expensive to maintain such a road.
In some cases, yes. Maintaining and improving roads will be paid out of different budgets. Federal, State, (sometimes) County, Local Municipality. Tertiary roads are almost certainly out of the local budget.
If it's not expressly prohibited, there's bound to be heavier traffic on these tertiary streets. The heavier vehicles do far more damage.
(There's also safety to be concerned with.)
It's okay to route traffic through these areas when it's an emergency. Occasional use is not going to be a significant impactor. However, with regular use, it's going to result in rapid deterioration.
If you really want to dig into this, here's a link to a study:
https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf
There are many, many more. If you're curious about the weight issue, it's known as ESAL and this page is pretty easy to digest:
http://www.pavementinteractive.org/loads/
Increased traffic on a road not meant to take it indicates some unmet demand, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the correct response is to accept the traffic on that road. It may be better to open things up elsewhere.
Also note that it's possible for adding routes to reduce efficiency, and thus for removing routes to increase efficiency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox
Finally, there's the problem of externalities. Road traffic has costs to the people nearby, in terms of noise, pollution, and danger. The drivers don't experience those costs, and rarely factor them into the decision of which route to take. Putting a lot of traffic onto a residential road not meant to take it can easily be a net negative.
It may be better to open things up elsewhere, as long as the reason that it is elsewhere is not because elsewhere had a weaker residents association.
I've seen the paradox you mentioned a few times, but I think it is like a lot of paradoxes, interesting but rare and not very relevant most of the time.
It may be a net negative for the people on that street, but overall, I'm not so sure.
In the UK, it is fairly common for people to have to park on the street rather than have their own driveways. Some local authorities also require each household to have 2 or 3 refuse bins and, because homes were not designed to accommodate them, these are also often placed at the roadside.
All of this is just about manageable most of the time but imagine the chaos when you get 100's of cars using your street as a short cut twice a day?
Also, your typical 'rat-runner' tends to be a bad tempered person with a tendency to drive over the speed limit (typically 30 mph in the UK, which is quite fast enough for a residential street). Needless to say, if you are unlucky enough to have to live on a rat-run you can expect your car to be damaged two or three times a year.
And, of course, the guilty party always drives off without reporting it.
Oh, and if you have kids - you can just imagine!
Furthermore, the supposed efficiency saving is, at best, negligible since a busy rat-run becomes congested much more readily than the major road everyone is avoiding.
Maybe it is also in your best interests if the street is modified to accommodate modern use cases.
At least in the UK, in a lot of cases that's just not feasible. Take the image I posted above for instance: http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DXHF2G/terraced-street-in-hillsboro...
The only ways to widen the road would be A) prohibit parking -> now residents have nowhere to park, or B) start demolishing houses.
I wouldn't assume there's an overall efficiency gain. That's part of the problem: in many cases, a shortcut that would work if a few cars used it causes problems (jammed intersections, etc.) if too many cars try to take advantage.
Someone who knows graph theory more than I do could comment, but more generally I don't think there's any guarantee that a situation where every vehicle uses a greedy algorithm will result in overall greatest efficiency. I could swear there was an article on this within the last year but I cannot find it.
Streets are not fungible "vehicular transportation widgets." They serve many purposes. In many places, relatively quiet neighborhood streets serve as unofficial (but sometimes official) transportation infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as spaces for community. They can only serve this purpose if they are low-traffic. Taking your kids on errands on a cargo bike, or letting them walk to school or to a neighbor's house, or letting them play basketball on the street, or teaching them how to ride a bike--all possible on a low-traffic neighborhood street, all very ill-advised on a high-traffic one.
Higher traffic on these streets expands the space available for motor vehicles, but it literally destroys transportation infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians. As someone who lives on a major arterial but commutes (by bike, with kids) on quiet neighborhood streets, I strongly support the diversion of traffic to the former.
Those roads can barely handle the traffic they get because they are so narrow, so people using them at speed to avoid more suitable roads is a problem. It's:
* less safe for residents (inherent to more traffic, but especially so given how close the entryways are to the road), and, for better or worse, there may be children playing in the street
* makes it more dangerous to park there (risk of damage from passing vehicles)
* less convenient to park if you have to negotiate heavy traffic
* adds unwanted noise - typical residential traffic volumes/patterns aren't too bad, but I wouldn't want heavy traffic passing by just outside my front room.
Its negative connotation is well-earned IMO (especially as _anecdotally_ many of the drivers looking to take advantage of such routes drive at excessive speeds for the road conditions). In a lot of cases, the volume of traffic on those roads SHOULDN'T increase - they just aren't designed for it.
I'd also question if it is actually more efficient - with how narrow these sorts of streets are, and the likelihood of people wanting to park etc., you aren't going to get a smooth flow of traffic as people try to negotiate round each other.
> It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
It's mostly a term used where there is a larger road in the vicinity, but people use the residential streets to avoid congestion or take a marginally shorter route. It's not really a case of shuffling the traffic off onto other residential streets.
Interesting, this isn't my experience. I think this is a size issue. In major cities probably. Out here in the 'burbs, I call the police about a speeder, and there's an officer with a radar gun out within the hour. Speeding tickets are nice funding for the department. Add a reckless driving on there and you got a nice doozy.
What happens more often than not though is you get two really annoying speed humps installed if enough calls about it come through.
To get a police officer to come to you within the hour in the UK you would have to have reported a murder at the very least.
feel free to drop us a line -- sales [at] flocksafety.com
Also unless I'm misunderstanding it doesn't seems to be capturing the speed of vehicles either, although I wonder if doing that accurately would require more precise mounting and calibration.
I was wondering if you could identify these 'sensors' somehow, but it looks like they're using cell networks, which as far as I understand means there is no plaintext unique identifier.
Does this mean something similar could be done with tracking of people via facial recognition? (Or is that different somehow?).
So, the answer to your last question is "yes", same as with any other camera.
a) Discover the camera was a dummy;
b) It was out of service at the time of the incident;
c) The camera is a live stream only and does not record footage;
c) The owner is unwilling to pore over hours of footage to help you;
d) They find an image but the quality is insufficient to identify a person or a vehicle;
e) They find a satisfactory image but are unable to share it with you for data protection reasons.
A cheap hi-res outdoor day/night webcam (~$150) A server running openalpr (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr)
Job done
Sometimes they get photos of the thieves from their security systems, but they NEVER get plate numbers. This could be an awesome solution.
The illumination is software controlled, so you can add extra flood lights depending on need.
However your range is limited by resolution, so it might not be needed.
However you'll have to take precautions about firewalling as they are cheap internet enabled webcams...
I’m immediately reminded of Jon Ronson’s article ‘Who killed Richard Cullen?’[1] where companies such as Experian sell relational geo-data on people to whatever companies want to use that data to target and potentially manipulate people.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2005/jul/16/creditcards.de...
In Canada anybody can get the name associated with a plate, but it costs ~$30 CAD and your name and drivers license number is verified and stored to do so. If you want the address you must be a licensed private investigator (~$350 CAD course and ~$80 CAD test) or police, again the access is logged.
In the UK you need to write to the ministry for even a name, not sure of the level of difficulty or likelihood of the request being granted.
In the USA, it depends on the state. Many you can get freely and anonymously from a 3rd party database.
Not legal ones. The whole point of the number plate is as an identifier for the vehicle.
I've been thinking about logging all the traffic down my street as a fun project as a way to learn OpenCV.
I'm admittedly rather unqualified in this area (I don't even know what the ITS industry is!) but I have experience in estimating distances from video and calculating speeds from pixel displacement (particle image velocimetry) and at first pass it seems to me this would be a fairly straightforward problem to solve.
Obviously radar or lidar would be preferable but a quick search for "OpenCV speed estimation" shows people having success with simple single <$50 camera setups.
If the LEDs are 10cm apart, and parallel to the street, and left dot vanishes 7.45645 ms after the right dot, then something was moving through the beams from right to left at 30 miles per hour (13.4112 m/s). If right dot vanishes 4.06716 ms after left dot, something was moving left to right at 55 mph (24.5872 m/s).
You can even get an estimate of vehicle length and acceleration if you watch for the dots to reappear.
The frame rates and resolutions of most cameras aren't great for precisely estimating speed. You would need a high-speed camera, which is wasted on a surveillance application. So you just use two cameras, one that sees 16 infrared pixels with an ultra high frame rate, and one that sees many RGB pixels at 24 fps.
How good do you think the numbers would be? For example, the speed limit on my road is 25 mph but I know people routinely drive through at 40 mph. Would a camera system be good enough to record, say, 30 mph with error bars equal to +/- 5 mph?
If you can set up clear distance markers 100m apart on the road itself, a regular surveillance camera set up with its line-of-sight perpendicular to the road could probably estimate speeds between 5 and 80 mph with at least 1 mph precision, and adding some image processing software could probably give you 0.1 mph precision or better.
Oblique views, curved roads, unclear markers, or even differently colored cars could produce false results, or no results at all.
It may be enough to convince your local cop shop to set up a radar trailer on your street for a few days, but you're not going to be convicting anyone of reckless driving with it.
Edit: a quick search led me to this https://gregtinkers.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/car-speed-detec...
and this https://github.com/pageauc/speed-camera
Set up your RPi camera about 20m from the road, with it's FOV that'll give you about 20 m of road coverage. Rule of thumb in my world is that the items of interest should not move more than 1/4 of window width between frames. So that's 5m, to move 5m between frames at 30Hz you'd need to be doing about 300 mph. More realistically the car might be doing 25m/s giving you an inter-frame displacement of 0.8m ~130px. If that's too little for your software to register just up the inter-frame time.
An ordinary surveillance camera certainly can estimate speed, especially with good software, but a dedicated device would likely give a better performance to price ratio or performance to power ratio. Maybe I'm just too old, and still think that a RPi and enough resolution for a human to actually discern an image is overkill, because I'm used to computing power and image resolution being expensive.
But then again, if you're already using that setup to read license plate numbers, you're not actually starting from zero. The marginal effort to estimate speed on top of that is likely less than a purpose-built device.
You'd only get an average speed but that should be enough to catch the worst offenders.
Something like this[1] has been used on UK motorways for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECS_(speed_camera)
If new technology drastically changes what is possible with such data, it's up to society to change the law. Don't want the whole world to have access to your location data 20+ years back? Find enough people who agree, and it won't happen.
There are many countries (i. e. all of Europe) where such a database would already be illegal, and I'm having a hard time thinking of the possible downsides.
Sure, there's a sort of abstract notion of freedom at stake. But any real harm would require some slippery-slope argumentation. At the same time, there is a direct, obvious, and (in my opinion) rather strong loss of freedom that comes with such a breach of privacy.
All those defending those neo-nazis in Charlottesville and their right to assembly should oppose something like this. Because with such a database, there'd be pretty good lists of everyone who participated in any such rallies in the last decade online right now.
Want to keep your sexual orientation, religion, or political affiliation from your prospective employer? No longer possible. Happened to be in the same place as some criminal more than statistics would suggest? You're now a suspect. Etc etc.
When I am out and about, I expect to be the background NPC labeled as "villager", until I do something that would give someone adequate reason to identify me.
My biggest issue, though, is the inequitable terms of tracking. If you live in a given neighborhood then you can opt out. Great. That gives those people preference. And treats everyone else as lesser citizens because they don't live there. We're talking about public spaces so there really shouldn't be any inequity. I think the company behind this sees the opt out ability for locals as the only way to make this palatable to people on a large scale.
Also, how is "neighborhood" defined? I assume it's by them and has some radius or something like that. And I'm also fairly certain to opt out would require me creating an account and providing my name, address, and car info (at minimum).
You want to record everything in public spaces? Fine, the law says you can do that so I respect that right. But that does not mean I am a fan of this by any stretch of the imagination. I feel like the real reason for this is something more nefarious they have planned later on - it could really be a way to finally track the remaining untrackables in our society who may be older and not have or use all the fancy tech we have today that tracks everything. It could also include people like myself that go to reasonable but not insane methods to circumvent tracking methods simply because I don't like to be tracked. There's really nothing I can do if they see me leave my house and drive to my friend's place and hang out there for 5 hours. Since I don't use social media they can't really connect that he and I are close friends without a tool like this. They can now make that association, which was previously near impossible to achieve.
I can't tell you how I know this, but drive just about anywhere within 20 miles of DC and everything about you that is possible is processed, cataloged, cross-references, and stored.
Luckily for me I drive an old car (definitely pre-bluetooth for sure) so that part wouldn't apply to me, but the increasing use of plate readers applies to everyone, everywhere.
I cannot tell you where I know this from, but the newest top secret satellites launched recently from Florida will cover the whole US terrain with infrared scanners. Now, given every person has a different size of veins running under their skin in slightly different ways, there are no two people with the same configuration of blood circulation system. So unless you are wearing metal armor 24/7, you are being tracked and cataloged of when and how long you been.
So please - update your tires to let your car know and to notify you when your pressure is low. It might safe your life!
We could definitely drive up to Las Vegas and make a bonding, lawful bet. But I need to know how much $ you have on your mind, so I'm not wasting my time here.
I assume "mental check" would be done by physician selected by you. But as long as she/he has expertise in the field and is licensed in the USA, I'm fine with that.
But even beyond that, water vapor is opaque to most IR frequencies. So a cloudy day would be enough to render this system useless.
100% bullshit imho.
AFAIK, TPMS systems are all proprietary and use much simpler protocols than BT.
https://github.com/jboone/tpms
Loosely related...
There are two types if TPMS, direct and indirect.
Direct TMPS use a battery powered sensor on either side of the valve stem to monitor tire pressure and transmit it wirelessly to the car's computer. They're very precise but rely on an expensive battery powered sensor on the valve stem, because of this they are less reliable, prone to failure, damage and tamper. You can identify direct TPMS by the green valve stem caps on a car.
Indirect monitoring leverages the tire speed sensor of the ABS or ESC systems to monitor drag induced by a tire with low pressure, it's not precise but it's accurate and far more reliable. And quite clever IMO.
The NHTSA instituted rule 126 requiring ESC on most vehicles, since TPMS and ABS are subsets of technology necessary for ESC, you should see all three features offered on most new cars today.
As a surveillance system, this has only modest potential. It would be useful to pair this with license plate readers, and notice cars whose license plate/tire ID relationships have changed.
It's probably more useful for taking inventory at car rental lots and finding abandoned/overtime cars in big parking lots. There might be commercial potential in this. Anybody with a big fleet could use something that checks their vehicles as they go in and out.
[1] http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~Gruteser/papers/xu_tpms10.pdf [2] http://elib.dlr.de/71397/1/VP_TS_NearctisTPMS_110607.pdf
How/Why?
The suggestion above is to merely take note, as it is unusual.
Or, I suppose, legally swapping wheels, or just pressure sensors.
Then what if I take these images and post them online with your name and address? It's all public information and data captured outside of your house. It should then be fine for me to take this public data and sell it to an aggregator, say Facebook and Amazon, right?
Where do you draw the line?
Gated communities fall into this class. So this camera would be targeting the HOA market, but not gated communities which have gates, locks and guards.
Personally, I don't like HOAs, and I don't like private neighborhoods. To the point that I refuse to look at property with an HOA.
But this obviously takes more effort than simply buying property that isn't subject to a HOA in the first place.
Your state court system may also be able to clear restrictive covenants from your property if the HOA makes any mistakes in enforcement. That is highly dependent on your neighbors, so success is by no means guaranteed.
A lot of HOAs can be brought to heel by threatening to erect antennas on your property, for the purposes of amateur radio communications and reception of broadcast signals. No covenant restricting those types of antennas is enforceable in the US, and most of the HOAs know it, or will know it shortly after consulting with a lawyer.
Once people start referring you as the Nagging Committee, it's hard to walk back from that.
I would bet money that they will be using this system for mapping and tracking for autonomous cars driving the last mile. If you want to bootstrap that localized map, then you need to have a use case that is not driverless cars currently.
Shouldn't there be a law against building databases containing other people's data?
In various other parts of the world, if this system works as described in the news articles then it's probably going to get eaten alive, possibly along with anyone deploying it.
A similar thing can be said about taking photographs (which is legal) versus recording people's behavior in a database (akin to drag-net surveillance, which we do not trust the government with, let alone companies or individuals).
Actually, I think it's legal for individuals or companies but not for the government. For example, the government can't install surveillance cameras in a shopping mall, but the mall owner can. The government can't watch people shop in stores, but stores are installing cameras to track how people move through the store, what items they smile at, and what they finally buy.
I was listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about a future where companies will drive around, pick up peoples trash, then process it to build a profile of the household. Because trash is fair game once you drop it off at the curb, they claimed there was nothing stopping anybody from doing this.
It was a very brief segment and I couldn't find it, but the idea stood out to me. I could totally see somebody thinking about this - thinking about how much it costs to dispose of a bag of garbage plus the cost to process it compared to the value of the data inside. I could see a company like Amazon figuring out which neighborhoods have their best customers and wanting that data to figure out how to sell them even more stuff.
It's simultaneously fascinating and abhorrent to me.
It is a valuable, good thing that anyone's activity in public can be summarized, written down, recorded on video/audio. This way we can punish criminals and corrupt officials.
The protections from the US Bill of Rights don't shield us from law enforcement doing the same. In the past this has been (mostly?) a net benefit. If you commit crimes in public or leave evidence of a crime in public and it's found by investigators, it does not constitute "unreasonable search" of the government.
Should this be legal? It's a tough call IMO. I recognize the enormous potential for abuse, but this seems more beneficial than harmful. I would not be surprised if we cross a threshold where the amount of information gathered has more potential for harm than good in the next decade or two.
This is exactly covered by EU data protection law.
Why did YC invest in this? Are there published ethical rules YC tries to follow?
I think you are getting some pushback because a lot of neighborhood watch groups have a reputation for looking out for "wrong looking people." The Trayvon Martin case surely didn't help, either.
Also, crime in the US is an all time low, but perception of crime is at an all time high. This is good for your product, but not for our society.
The Big One™ that hits and sends all of Silicon Valley crashing into the Pacific can't come soon enough...
I don't want mob delivered justice based on bad data.
Actually, it tracks who is the registered owner of the license plate numbers read off the vehicles driving in your area, which is subtly different from even what you describe.
this is garrett (co-founder of Flock)
Unwinding who really owns the vehicle is still possible for government, though still not quick or automated. It would make it very difficult for private efforts like this one.
Lot of work though.
our goal is to provide police with the evidence they need to solve crime.
today only 13% of non-violent crime is solved. we think it should be 100%.
I applaud your sense of civic duty, but having a complete panopticon of all outside activities for an unobtainable goal of 100% seems absurd.
You keep using the word “neighborhood” as if it referred to a legal entity with a defined authority structure that can make decisions and own property. This is generally not the case, so it is apparent that this is being used as a sloppy, PR-friendly term for something else, like maybe an HOA. What specifically do you mean when you say “neighborhood”?
This is going to go over big in religious communities. Control-freak religions such as Scientology and Haredi Judaism will go for this. Both already operate sizable camera networks in areas where they have power.
It would be so easy to track everyone in those cities. And that would really up the level of danger to those residents.
some neighborhoods give every resident unlimited access while others require a police report before logging in.
“Neighborhoods” generally aren't legal entities that you can deal with this way. When you say “neighborhood” here, are you talking about an homeowners association (which is a very different thing than a “neighborhood”) or...what, exactly?
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-traffic/20...
This kind of surveillance makes a mockery of the concept of privacy and anonymity. Nor only is data collected but it is stored enabling profiling.
The whole point of rule of law is to find common ground to temper out of control self interest. This is akin to stalking people going about their daily lives and should be illegal.
Why is YC supporting this. Why is anyone supporting this? Unless you take a stand minute to minute surveillance of everyone's lives will become the new normal.
Really, if a criminal were to drive in and loot a house in your neighborhood, what self respecting criminal wouldn't use dummy plates or a lifted car to commit robberies and at least some sort of identity obfuscation. Let's not pretend this is a noble invention.
While out in public you may not have a right to privacy, there's certainly a level of general anonymity that most of us assume. While such plate reading technology has existed for some time, now it could be easily deployed by a overbearing ex-lover to know if/when person is home or worse, a hate group outside an abortion clinic.
File this under war on privacy to further usher in a technocratic hellscape future.