Re: Drive the SF Central Freeway, have your license plate photo'ed.
At 10:45 PM 8/8/96 -0700, Lucky wrote:
At 21:55 8/8/96, i am not a number! wrote:
CBS radio news this morning: 80,000 commuters traveling the central f'way in SF will have information mailed to them regarding the quake retrofit How? Their license plates have been photographed.
You *are* making this up, right? Please say you did.
It's possible today, and probably affordable. If not, it will be in 1-2 years, as Moore's law cranks down processing costs and video technology improves. For this application, they don't have to photograph every car, or read every plate successfully, or do it in real time. The objective is to get lots of drivers to take other routes or mass transit so they don't have to dump all the traffic onto surface streets right around the construction. Besides, this is nice friendly San Francisco. Imagine New York City doing it: Yo! Mr. E. Koch, 1234 E. 89th St. - We saw you takin' the West Side Highway last week. You better stop that as of next Friday. We know where you live. You got a problem wit' that? Rudy. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!
Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> writes: At 10:45 PM 8/8/96 -0700, Lucky wrote: You *are* making this up, right? Please say you did.
It's possible today, and probably affordable.
It's been reasonably affordable for several years. Video number plate reading is routinely used around here for gathering statistics on the points of origin of commuter traffic, for highway planning purposes. (The numbers are looked up in the Registry database to find where each commuter is likely to have come from.) -- Roger Williams finger me for my PGP public key Coelacanth Engineering consulting & turnkey product development Middleborough, MA wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/
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Roger Williams