immortalised

It Had to Be

;-))

DieSea

The auto-smudger seems to have missed your reg plate though!

But maybe not the other plate in the rear window? Wassat?

"Austin Shackles" wrote

I just realised I was round your way just over a year ago for a funeral at Llandysul.

and my Defender (which the observant might note was then sans-engine) and next to it my (now sold) 530d.

AC.

On or around Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:33:33 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

yeah, I thought that was rather amusing TBH. You'd think they could recognise a reg plate...

the other plate is the Private Hire licence plate.

It probably assumes there's only one plate on a vehicle and picked the wrong one! I wonder if it does the same for other taxi type vehicles or whether there's some vehicle type recognition going on and you got caught out because it's not a typical taxi type vehicle.

You'll also notice that it took a liking to the LH bumper light cluster.

I'm not convinced it has blurred the PH plate, I think it reckons the lamp cluster is the reg plate!

I'm sure that your friendly government wouldn't encourage such underhand practices!

I will however start to worry when speed cameras have the ability to differentiate between, for example, cars with and without caravans and apply speed limits accordingly.

I went on one of those "speed awareness" courses, which was the expected mess of contradictory broad-brush garbage, e.g. lorries vans and cars all having the same stopping distances, with a few people competing with each other to flagellate themselves (even saying they thought they deserved to be prosecuted for dangerous driving, they weren't so sure when it was pointed out that carries up to a 14 year prison sentence), a daft posh woman who turned up in johdpurs and riding boots who insisted that all country lanes were 30MPH limits, and a few other gems too.

There was a van driver who went on and on about how he'd been on an advanced drivers course but could only remember to "look under cars", and didn't know that his van was limited to 50MPH on normal roads and 60MPH on dual carriageways despite having been driving it for some 15 years. The instructors told him that speed cameras can tell the difference between cars and vans, I've never seen any evidence of that, but then the whole course was basically OK for the first 15 mins before the torrent of s**te started, I just tried to make myself invisible and eat as many biscuits as I could.

It knows the differnce between cars and vans because, when the picture is processed, the person or machine processing it looks up the details in the DVLA database. The film ones aren't normally set up to flash below the highest limit on the road, while the digital ones record

At the time of flashing, it certainly can't tell a coach from a lorry, but can be set to tell whether a vehicle is bigger than a car.

Sorry, I forgot to mention the average speed cameras, which record the time when everything passes them, checks what type of vehicle it is, then checks the time of arrival at the next camera down the road, and if it get there too early, it sends you the ticket. It's all done in the one box in an office somewhere, apart from the data links, though, there's not that much intelligence inside the cameras, just enough to read a number plate.

How? To the best of my knowledge the speed limits in the UK are speeds not averages. The offence would be exceeding the posted speed limit, there is no such offence as exceeding the average speed!

Yes I thought the ANPR type units could probably do it but not the GATSO units, I've been through a fair few cameras at just below the flashing point with vans around me and they've not gone off.

I don't know what kind of camera got me but I don't recall seeing any flash, and at 35MPH I doubt I'd be particularly concentrating on the road ahead in the way you do when you're caning it so I was surprised to have missed it. I might have to see if I can decode the cryptic location references and see what was there.

Its no different than the old Vascar units which compared speed over distance and time. Except that instead of a person pushing the buttons the camera is doing it. The Vascar units were mounted on a dashboard and mobile, then needed (in the old days) to be processed by a person rather than automated.

I can't remember the last time I saw a Vasacr unit.

Lee

If you cover the limited stretch at a speed that's not possible without going over the speed limit then that's good enough. You can of course tailgate lorries through the average cameras so they don't see your plate, you don't even need to manage it with every one of them, err, I'm told. It seems that they either work in pairs even on long stretches where there's lots of them, or you have to register on all or most of the cameras to get done.

"Ian Rawlings" wrote

Are you saying my Hardtop (van) is limited to 50mph on normal roads and 60 mph on dual carriageways? Theoretically speaking, of course, won't cruise at much more anyway.

You're right. If you exceed the average speed though, you *must* have exceeded the limit at some point. All they need to do is charge that at some time between and you exceeded the limit.

The cameras even warn you "Average speed checks in force" when you enter an area where they're in use, such as at Motorway roadworks.