"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. 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).

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 and national vehicle databases. That in itself is a
substantial IT project. There are significant costs associated with
assessing and compying with the data protection aspects. There is the
cost of the enabling legislation in all the countries involved and the
cost of publicising the new scheme. 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.

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

Peter

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|| Peter CS ~ Epsom ~ UK | pjcs02 [at] gmail.com |