Originally posted by Tarmac
Beetle, I was in the Thames Valley police station (the one in Reading) a while ago studying the British police. I was amazed by the network of cameras that were in the city, and the amazing coverage and detail they were capable of. These cameras were controlled, with full zoom and 360 rotation, from a command room in the police station. Do these highway speed cameras tie into that network, or are they purely for taking pictures of licence plates? Could they be used for real-time feeds of information if needed?
Damn, Tarmac! That's about 6 miles from my house! Call me next time.
The main highways (both motorways and major A-roads) have those cameras. The police use them to monitor traffic so that they can deploy officers and other emergency services to the scene of an accident. These same cameras help police in a control room to relay traffic information to roadside transmitters. This traffic info can be picked up by passing traffic equipped with TrafficMaster™. I have a TrafficMaster Freeway unit mounted on the dash in my car, and I turn it on when I'm about to travel on a motorway or other major highway. A female robotic voice says
"TrafficMaster" to confirm that the system is active. Then, when driving along, each time I pass one of the roadside transmitters, the system beeps. That beep signals that the data has been updated and that the road ahead is clear. If I then press a button, the same voice will report my position, eg.
"You are travelling westbound on M4 towards junction 6. Traffic flowing freely." If there is a snarl up ahead of me (the system is smart enough not to report problems behind me) the voice pipes up automatically to report the problem. Just the other day I was headed east on the M40 towards the M25 (encircles London) and was about to take M25 clockwise to J19 to get to Watford. The automatic warning was something like
"You are travelling eastbound on M40 towards juntion 3. M25 anticlockwise, very slow traffic between junction 16 and junction 13. Expect 5 minute delay. M25 clockwise, traffic flowing freely. M40 eastbound, traffic flowing freely". There are varying degrees of severity - I've heard 30 minutes delay, and even
"...stationary traffic for 6 miles. Avoid". These messages help the user to modify the planned route to avoid the problem area.
But you have to avoid overreacting to TrafficMaster. Sometimes an alternate route can be worse than toughing it out for 5 minutes on the motorway.
You can find out how it all works at the
TrafficMaster™ website. If you go to "Products", you can see the
Freeway unit like the one I have. I just use batteries for mine, but it can be wired into the car's electrical system.
The M25 motorway is known as Europe's largest car park - lol. Very heavy traffic, especially near London Heathrow Airport. A system of variable speed limits exists. Typically, the limit will be 60. Heavy traffic will cause this to reduce to 50 or even less. It's four lanes in each direction in that area, and every lane is monitored by camera. You get busted if you break the variable speed limit.
