A CONTROVERSIAL automated traffic charging system being introduced to London could be a lot easier to cheat than its supporters are claiming.
Transport for London (TfL), which reports to London Mayor Ken Livingstone, is spending £300 million on setting up the system. This will involve installing a ring of cameras around the inner city, which will record the licence plates of all vehicles as they enter. If successful, other cities including Copenhagen and Paris are lining up to follow suit.
The aim is to cut the 250,000 cars currently driven into central London every day by 10 per cent. Drivers will have the option of paying £5 for each car per day, in advance or on the day. If they fail to pay by midnight, their licence plate will be cross-checked with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database and an £80 fine dispatched to their home address.
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TfL says the system should generate £150 million profit a year. But experts have warned that a large number of cars could slip through the net because of the way the system is set up. “The new scheme will be an utter nightmare. The honest motorist with nice clean plates will be subsidising the people with dirty plates who don’t pay,” warns Paul Watters of the Automobile Association.
Unlike other traffic charging systems, such as one already in use in Singapore, London’s will not need any extra equipment to be fitted to cars or barriers to be installed on the roads. It relies on optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read each number plate as the car passes fixed cameras.
Two years ago, the ROCOL working group of 21 experts warned in its report Road Charging Options for London that up to 30 per cent of cars could slip through undetected “because of number plates being unreadable or obscured by other traffic, incomplete readings or vehicles incorrectly registered”. They also warned similar-looking plates might be misread, resulting in innocent people being fined.
TfL has tried to get round some of these problems by mounting the cameras on 8-metre-tall poles that give a bird’s-eye view of the traffic. So number plates can still be read even when vehicles are deliberately driven bumper-to-bumper. Moreover, TfL claims the OCR technology has improved since 2000, and that its system can read 9 out of 10 plates as vehicles pass.
But even if the OCR is reliable further problems can occur down the line. “There will be cumulative error,” says Watters. As things stand, 10 per cent of parking fines in London cannot be collected because the cars are wrongly registered. “People put their car in a child’s name and maliciously give someone else’s address,” explains Watters. “We already have councils trying to sue six-year-olds and sending bailiffs to innocent people’s homes.”
