suboptimal data collection strategies - or a secret plan to spy on us

A strange sight: four people wearing hi-viz sitting on the St Werbughs crossing of the M32

What are they up to? The "Highways Agency" text on the back gives the game away -they are monitoring traffic flow, with multiple people to independently monitor different lanes,
 
Some questions spring to mind

1. Why hi-viz? Really? It's a pedestrian footpath that some cyclists also use. Unless you have a fear of being run over by one of those two-kid-wide pushchairs, its the safest place in the city to sit. 
2. Counting traffic by hand? Why not just go to the bit of the Highways Agency that collects the ANPR data and use that instead. If you hook the M32 data up with those of the M4W, M4E and M5 feeds, you can even work out where people go to after leaving the M32. As any vehicle not found on those other feeds must have got off at Eastville or the North Fringe, you get those figures for free.

The fact that they aren't using the ANPR data may be sign that the UK Government police-state-on-motorists isn't as all encompassing as the daily mail and daily telegraph warn us of; that there isn't any coverage of the M32 at all. The four people on the footbridge are therefore implicity sharing a secret with us.

That or there is ANPR scanning of every vehicle entering or leaving the city, and those four people are sitting there to pretend that there isn't -they think they are counting traffic but their numbers are being discarded in preference for the machine-collected statistics. Only someone very paranoid would think that. Which is precisely why we suspect it.

Camera Enforcement Vehicle: Bristol declares war on school parents

"Camera Enforcement Vehicle". An odd term. It has a hint of Mad Max's "Interceptor", back in the days when Mel Gibson did half-decent films. In Mad Max, the interceptor existed to catch criminals threatening the streets and the safety of citizens.

We are sure that the council thinks their Enforcement Vehicle is there for the same goal, but we know what it has done: it has declared war on hardworking school parents who have nowhere to park their 4x4 for child dropoff except in the School Keep Clear lanes.

Today: when you see the traffic officers outside the school you know to drive pass, take the five minute hit on child dropoff to avoid the ticket. Once they've been and gone, that's it for the term. Safe. But not now.

Look at this car  R009OVT. It's got a camera on top, a GPS unit lurking inside. Now all it has to do is drive past a school and it can take a photograph of all the parents parked in the parent-parking-zone, then send them tickets later. Because it can do drive-by ticketing, it can cover multiple schools in a day -increasing the risk of getting caught. And you don't get any warning, you won't know to detour on the dropoff that day. After the dropoff: uncertainty. Did they pick on you today?

Worse yet the ANPR school parking car is not just targeting school zigzags, but also anyone stopping in a bus stop. Is it really so bad for people to have to get off the bus in the middle of the road? If people are worried about safety then the bus driver could simply drive on to the next stop (as they are apparently officially expected to do)!

They are enforcing loading restrictions, so stopping legitimate traders like Tesco from stopping their vans outside shops during rush hour. What sort of priority does Bristol put on the economy?

Even worse: the Evening Post isn't on our side here. They have joined the War against Motorists, in the same week the evil anti-car EU bumped up fuel prices by declaring an oil embargo against Iran. This is just victimisation

There's only one way to defeat this: stand firm.

Make sure nobody from your kids school calls Parking Services on 0117 922 2198 giving them the school location and exact time morning and evening when they would catch the most parents on a drive by.

Similarly, make sure they don't email parking.services at bristol.gov.uk giving them the same details, or telling them of your favourite secret bus-stop short-stay parking areas.

If nobody tells them of the places and times they should be enforcing parking at schools or in bus stops -we will continue to be able to exercise our right to do so!

Quick Everybody!

Quick.

Whiteladies Road is no longer under surveillance... thanks to this parked removals lorry.

The opportunities for penalty-free nefarious car-oriented misdemeanours in 'The Strip' are currently rife!

The Watchman has arrived

When discussing what looked like a bus lane camera, James Barlow, author of Bristol's second best web site, noted that it was a watchman. More research was called for.

The watchman series of cameras include ANPR, 3G data modem, high-resolution video camera and a local hard disk drive capable of storing number plates (2 million, they say), and video shorts. If you are speeding, they actually get a video. They can also do bus-lane violation checking, which may worry the Peugeot 307 seen doing exactly that. To verify that a car shouldn't be in there it is not enough to say "is it a car"; you need to check it isn't a taxi or minicab. The Association of British Drivers have a list of proposed allowed vehicles, including lifeboat crews. Before sending a ticket to the '307 driver, the council will have to verify that the drivers/passengers were not on a lifeboat callout, on their way to Bristol docks.

The Watchman is not designed for simple speed-traps; it is a monitoring tool. It looks like it may be able to measure traffic numbers and all vehicle speeds, which could be used for datamining. As it is not currently part of the national ANPR network used to monitor and log all motorway traffic "for homeland security", this may be data we could get hold of.

The camera comes with software that sends polite notes warning drivers of their behaviour; warning notes. Their purpose is to remind without penalising. If you get a ticket, you have to pay, the insurance company ups their charges, and you may get disqualified. If you get a polite note, you can ignore it, unless eventually you start to get tickets.

Will it work? The device itself can find out. Start by monitoring peak traffic speeds before the notes begin being sent out, and their registration numbers. Then start sending notes out, and see if peak speeding speeds drop -or if the previously noted vehicles get seen repeatedly. Again, this could be a simple datamining exercise.

The sales brochure implies the cameras can be set to look for specific vehicles; download a number in and the camera will send an alert out when a specific car is seen. With a hard disk, you've got room to store a lot of numbers to search through.

Security wise, the over-sturdy mounting point is probably designed to resist a truck driving into them and getting away. You can still drive a truck into them, but it will leave noticeable damage on your vehicle. The manufacturers are proud of their security measures, though they also give away the windows software needed to connect to the cameras. The attack points for this devices are no longer the yellow box, they are the network. The camera will have a mobile phone number and a password to guess; the computers used to access it will have to stay up to date with Windows monthly OS patches or they become a target in their own right. That's the problem with networked applications: you think your device has just discovered the Internet, but in reality, the Internet has just discovered your device.

Disabled parking issues

There is news that the government wants to create a central database of all owners of disabled parking tickets, to stop theft and forgery of the bits of blue paper that allow you to park where you want. This seems an expensive exercise in creating yet another central database; yet another place to lose personal data. For it to catch forgeries and theft, every time a parking or police officer saw a car with a disabled permit, they would have to check up on the database. This would build an implicit record of the location of every disabled vehicle in the country, which could be very interesting from a datamining perspective, with only a few civil liberties folk to whine about it. Do those people not realise that the War on Terror requires a few personal freedoms to be put aside?

In Bristol, we are not convinced that the central database makes economic sense. By allowing everyone to park where they want, even half-in a disabled bay, our city has eliminated the need to steal or forge a disabled parking sticker. Thus we get to save lots of money -on the database, and the enforcement. Isn't that a much better idea?

Incidentally, if the government does want to go the database route, we propose RFID-tagged number plates that can be automatically scanned in driveby audits. They would be harder to forge and it would be easier and cheaper to build up a complete database on the movement of people, one the council could get at. As it is today, the ANPR-based national car movement database is not available to the people who be able to use it to find out how people actually drive round the city: the traffic planners.