"Peter CS" wrote in message
...
"tim....." wrote in
:

The first is that ANPR is quite difficult, and really only works
acceptably reliably if you confine it to the font, colours, format,
spacing and so on of a single country's standard. This has improved
steadily over the last 20 years but there is still a gap between the
performance of one-country systems and all-country ones[1].

ANPR is the system that is to be used for checking manual post pay, so
what's the difference here?

If an ANPR mistake is made with an auto pay system the wrong person is
going to get the charge instead of the wrong person getting the fine
under a manual pay system.

The difference is that when there is an ANPR mismatch there is a cost in
sorting it out. If you have lots more mismatches the costs go up.

The number of mismatches is not going to go up.

The system still has to recognise the license numbers of, e.g. 300,000 cars
per day.

The number that it will mis-read is going to be exactly the same whether the
payment check is:

Add the number to a list waiting to be paid, delete from that list when
payment is made, and then manually check those that are left to make sure
that they were read correctly.

or

Go to national database to find registered account, bill that account and
manually check those people who complain that they have been wrongly billed.

OK so that is going to cost a little bit more to sort out, but they are
putting the cost up from 1.50 to 2.50 when this billing system comes in. I,
for one, think that we should be getting "better" service back for this
extra cost.

HMG putting the fee up and providing a worse service is IMHO trying to have
its cake and eat it!

In
the system I am familiar with, every case resulting in a penalty is
first eyeballed to check that the ANPR got it right, which involves a
team of several people full time. If you don't do that and just send
the fines out, you have to sort out the mismatches through subsequent
correspondence.

Secondly, once you've spotted car ABC 123, you need to check with
every country in Europe where ABC 123 is a valid sequence to find out
who owns it - and there may be more than one match as registration
marks are not unique across Europe. A central European database
would help this, but there are formidable (= expensive) legal and
practical obstacles to setting that up and keeping it up to date.

They have to do that already. If I want to use one of the various
European "vignette" payments it is no longer sufficient to just have
the sticker in your car. You have to register your number in THEIR
database so that they can check you have paid without stopping you.

Indeed they do, and for the one non-UK operation I am familiar with they
determine the country by eyeballing the pictures (and sometimes give up
because they can't tell).

OK, so this is a problem with billing foreigners using your roads. But
having an international billing database isn't going to to make that problem
any worse.

It is certainly the case that there is overlap in the registration marks
of plates between different EU countries. There was an EC proposal for
a unified EU numbering scheme, but it did not get adopted. If you look
at this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle...ates_of_Europe
you can see several non-UK plates which could be legacy UK marks. I am
not aware of any country that matches the current (AA99AAA) UK scheme,
but I could be wrong.

I don't see where these new costs are.

All of the systems I am suggesting currently exists except for the
common database.

At least 8 individual countries currently have databases of cars who
have paid to use their roads/motorways. They have a mechanism to
allow drivers (including foreigner) to register on that database.
They have ANPR cameras set up to to catch miscreants (or deduct
payments from a pre pay account or charge a post pay account). They
(somehow) find the address of foreign (as well as local) miscreants so
that they can sub-contract collecting the fines.

How can creating a common database (and an international method of
registering on it) really add significantly to the cost?

You are talking about integrating a large number of disparate systems -
ANPR systems

No I'm not. Each country keeps its ANPR (or not) recognition system
completely separate. All it does differently is access an international
database (instead of its local one) to find out the account holder for any
foreign vehicles that they spot.

and national vehicle databases.

1) No I'm not. I'm proposing that owners include their details in the
international "charging" database completely separately from any vehicle
registration. Registration will be voluntary, so foreigners will still be
able to use the current local mish-mash of payment methods that exist now.
But these are so (IMHO) foreigner unfriendly that any sensible person will
want to use an international database (provided that it is administered
sensibly)

2) They have to do this now for foreign drives who don't register their car
with the local database, so that they can fine them (assuming that they do),
so what's the difference here?

That in itself is a
substantial IT project.

yeah, but in the long term it will be no more than there being 57 different
databases each administered by a different body.

There are significant costs associated with
assessing and compying with the data protection aspects.

Rubbish. This cost will be tiny.

There is the
cost of the enabling legislation in all the countries involved and the

another tiny irrelevant cost

cost of publicising the new scheme.

The local schemes have to be publicised. How do you think is is that I
found out what it is that I had to do when I recently travelled through
CZ/SK/HU/PL/RO ... and what a load of hassle that was. Each county had a
different class of road that needed to be paid for, different types of
vehicle had to pay for different types of roads. Each country had different
rules about how you registered to pay, where you could do it when you could
do it, how long it lasted.

Any extra costs associated by publicly advertising an international payment
registration database is going to be more than compensated for by the
savings individuals are going to make trying to fight their way through the
current system(s).

Against that you have some benefits
which are given a monetary value by government economists and maybe some
income if you are charging for the use of the facility.

But you are charging punter's a fee - a fee to use the roads. IMHO the
costs associated with operating collecting that fee should be part of that
fee. How is anything else fair?

In the studies I have been involved with or have reviewed, the benefits
did not justify the costs.

Don't believe it.

Did they do the study by seeing how much effort it took someone who didn't
speak the local language to register to pay in each specific country.
Because from my experience the schemes are not properly documented in
English and certainly not in all 21 [1] (main) official EU languages (22 if
we include Norway, as I think it should). Working out whether I needed to
pay in HU required me asking the local representative because I bloody well
couldn't work it out from the published (English language) information.

And did they include the costs incurred (and hence to be saved) by people
who didn't realise that they had to register (like me when I went to P)
because the need to do so isn't advertised widely enough?

tim

[1] If I counted correctly, and that ignoring the secondary languages.