Are Street-Sweepers The Solution To Street Updates?

Fri

Apr 4
2008

listen

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?)

tags: geo | comments: 12 | Sphere It
submit:

Previous | Next

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/6420

Comments: 12

herbert [04.04.08 05:50 AM]

hi
its very intersting - but can i get more infomation in german lanuage?

Ajeet Khurana [04.04.08 07:07 AM]

Though the concern for privacy is valid, I think that the mindset we should operate with should be "Technology is here to stay. So instead of fighting it, why not accept it and spend our energies on safeguarding against misuse."

Benjamin Williams [04.04.08 08:04 AM]

I have no problem with Drudge...
Anyway, if the city did license the "feed" then when people stop parking in those zones, the ticket revenue will go back down, and then the city will still have to pay for the cameras.
Baseing your revenue on "bad behavior" is not really a good idea.

trendstrom [04.04.08 08:49 AM]

I don´t like to make people transparent. The actual scandal with monitoring employee in german stores is a good example, wie should not do!!

Mikel Maron [04.04.08 03:54 PM]

Reminds me of two things

- Eric Paulos is attaching small mobile pollution sensor devices to San Francisco street sweepers. The fleet covers the entire city every week, potentially a very rich ongoing data set.
http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/ParticipatoryUrbanism/index.html

- The city of Merano, Italy, has a custom, open source based GIS system that operates something like OpenStreetMap -- any city employee can update geographic data. So gardeners maintain the location of every tree, meter maids keep track of parking spaces, etc.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Merano

Ross Stapleton-Gray [04.06.08 10:20 PM]

I may be writing up an article on the license plate recognition trend; there've been some other developments, and collectively some significant changes.

On the "anything you can do, I can do, meta," theme, what this suggests to me, though, is that someone ought to get into the market to provide municipal and other fleet owners with a standard instrumentation platform that can be wirelessly connected (either continuously or store-and-forward) and accept any sort of sensors, from some number of interested parties. So, if you've got 500 buses and trucks, the company could equip them to serve as sensor platforms for commercial and other services, with some revenue calculus worked out so that the fleet owners and facilitator both take a cut from any party whose sensors ride the platforms.

Sven [04.10.08 04:28 PM]

Hi, i like it , but i looking for Infos in german lanuage.

Thomas Lord [04.10.08 05:57 PM]

Why are you curious about "should it be licensed" and questions like that? Who do you think you are?

-t

Team Quartier Soleil [11.06.08 01:58 PM]

Nice holiday home in Berlin.
Im shure we are coming back...