OT Lorry restricted to 40mph?

"steve robinson" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Won't help. A Land-Rover Discovery is heavier than an unladen 3.5t truck.

Measuring what?

So (we'll assume you're thinking just of the tiny minority of digital cameras) the cameras are all connected to DVLA and - on seeing a speeding vehicle - check the registration before deciding whether to take a picture or not?

No, it won't. A 7.5t truck may "look" identical to a heavier GVW one. A

"David A Stocks" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Except SPECS is almost always installed in places where the limit is the same for all classes of vehicles.

Conor gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Do you know this from direct personal experience? Or is it likely to be slightly Chinese Whispered? I can certainly believe a manned Talivan would be able to nick a wagon, no problem.

Digital they can just photo *everyone* at any speed, record the speed aginst the reg and do the look up later in the back office.

But would it matter if they took some photos of the wrong vehicles doing over 40mph on single track road? The photos get proccessed, they look up the vehicle from its reg, find its not a GVW so no offence and no NIP.

OK they have wasted 2 photos on the film roll that could have caught a genuine speeding motorist. They have wasted film process time and chemicals. They have wasted the time of the office staff that send out the NIP. No income and all expense.

Peter Hill gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

How many cars do you think pass a digital speed camera doing 40-60mph for every one wagon which might be exceeding 40mph?

If a film speed camera (the vast majority) were photographing every vehicle doing 40mph+ on a s/c NSL, how long do you think the film would last? The guy servicing it would have to sit next to it ready to change the film every ten minutes. The cost would be monumental.

Yep, because then of course the 'single carriageway NSL' rule doesn't apply. I can't remember if it's SC or DC to be honest.

I suppose a digital camera with ANPR might make a practical solution.

Chris Bartram gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Querying the DVLA record between detecting the speed and taking the pic?

Anyway, digital cameras are a tiny minority of speed cameras.

You could take the pic always, query the record, discard it if no good maybe? You'd have to do it without flash though.

Agreed.

Chris Bartram gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

If the camera is permanently connected to allow the DVLA record to be queried, then the images may as well be transmitted at the time of photography to a central processing unit to do the processing.

Except, of course, that whilst that'd offload the processing from the camera housing (thereby simplifying what's in there markedly) it'd require some reasonably serious bandwidth at high-traffic sites. Which they don't have. The data is stored onsite and physically collected.

That's quite an interesting read.

In theory, you could turn the above on its head and have the cameras

*more* intelligent/powerful: Take the pic of anything >40, do image capture and OCR in the camera, query the DVLA for the vehicle type, send back an answer that says 'fine' or 'no fine'. You could probably comfortably do that over GSM/GPRS, and maybe have the photos of the ones you have caught in local storage- or batch them up for transfer when the link is quiet.

Of course, this is all just in theory. It doesn't change the fact that doing this with the current cameras and infrastructure is probably not practical, so this is only interesting from a tech point of view and thinking how it might be done, rather than what is already there.

Chris Bartram gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

I think you're underestimating the bandwidth a bit - and the costs massively. Especially in the current climate.

Indeed.

Sure, it's technically feasible. That's not in doubt. It's really just ANPR or a little bolt-on to SPECS.

Doesn't matter a digital camera (which is what is being discussed above ! see I started that sentence with the word "DIGITAL") can store

10's of 1000's of photos. Just go collect once a week - you swap the drives for new ones. If it runs out of storage upgrade the disc drives.

We is now discussing "With the lorries a height sensor will suffice" so only vehicles that are over the height AND doing over 40 get a photo taken. Now how many vehicles per 1000000 are the height of a GVW AND are allowed to exceed 40mph on single carrigeways?

ISTR reading somewhere that length sensors are also being used.

Steve

So it takes a pretty picture of a chelsea tractor , of course it will work all the data gets fed back to the handling centre and the anomolies are taken out

Induction , the larger the metalic mass passing over the bigger the variation in the electrical field

So again once the registration is compared against the passing vehicle on the computersised database before the tickets sent out

Thats why the employ additional trigger units either by height , weight or induction loops , simple and cheap to install when set against the revenue collectable

Nope. Not had any points for 22 years.

Post on trucknet and the PDA and the people caught will answer you. AFAIK, the PDA ran a news article on it.

From:

Gatso cameras have always been able to detect the difference between large and small vehicles; a beam detects the length of the vehicle by constantly taking readings. There are 2 separate settings on the control box that the operator can set for the size of the vehicle, so in a National speed limit you could set the camera to only work on cars travelling at 68 mph or above, but the large vehicle for 46 mph.

Read more:

Maybe. It would be one of those 'it depends' bandwidth answers... if you had a constant stream of traffic you'd never get a quiet period to send the buffer in.

Ah, well I never said it would be cheap :-). theres a lot of processing and it would all have to be certified and approved and calibrated.

It's pretty damned unlikely, lets face it, but as you say, totally doable with the right amount of cash.