Are Street-Sweepers The Solution To Street Updates?

The Washington Times reports that Washington D.C. will soon add cameras to its street-sweepers. These cameras will be able to “scan license plates and photograph vehicles illegally parked in a street-sweeping zone”.

Currently the city has people do this work, but they are only able to cover 20% of the zones. The city already runs surveillance cameras to attempt to prevent crime.

The article discusses the concerns about the increase in revenue for the city (potentially $213K extra per month; this will, I assume, pay for the cameras) with only a brief mention of privacy. I am really curious where this data will go. Could the output of the cameras be licensed? Should it be licensed? That might bring in some additional revenue for the city.

Realtime data is coming to the geoweb in the form of weather, traffic. and our friend’s locations. The base mapping data is not keeping up. Streets are creating and destroyed in between the 6-month to yearly updates. Stores come and go — each time changing their storefront and ruining streetside imagery.

Could street-sweepers armed with high-res cameras capture storefronts (while also ticketing cars) solve this problem? They hit almost every street in the city on a weekly basis. After reading enough science fiction novels it seems like they could easily be used for this purpose.

(via Drudgereport — hey, I can admit that I’m an election junkie; can you?)

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