Traffic congestion
From:
Andrew Groom
Date:
2007 Jul 24 22:26 UTC
Short link
Hi Paul,
paul scott wrote:
> All roads leading North from the City are now congested, but there was a
reasonable flow along Hills road to Marshlands.
When I read this, I'm just more and more convinced that some form of
toll on the motorway north of the city at peak times would make a huge
dent in this congestion problem, and generate some revenue that could be
fed directly back into a better public transport system along that route.
How hard would it be to set up a system that:
1. Automatically photographs license plates of cars entering or leaving
the motorway during peak times.
2. Uses character recognition software to automatically detect license
plates of passing cars (it does exist - check out:
3. Build some sort of billing system that either:
a) charges people per trip or
b) have some sort of flat monthly fee
This is not sci-fi - it's being done now in various places round the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition#Electronic_toll_collection
Richard, perhaps you could comment on whether this sort of system has
been looked into by the CCC for managing congestion, and if not, why not
? I accept that there are concerns about accuracy and privacy, but I'm
sure these could be overcome with a little creative thinking.
Cheers, Andrew.
.