New Speed camera that also checks your insurance, seat belt and tailgating

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ASSET speed camera also checks your seatbelt, insurance, can call the police all by its lonesome
By Tim Stevens posted Nov 8th 2010 9:13AM
Speed cameras have dubious legality in many places here in the States, but over in Europe they're an ugly fact of life. Now they're getting smarter, and the first is going into deployment in Finland. It's called ASSET, the Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport, which confusingly abbreviates to ASDSERT and is the product of ?7 in government funding and years of development. Each of the ?50,000 (about $70,000) cameras can naturally tell just how fast you're going and, if you're speeding, take a picture of you and your license plate number. That's just the beginning. It can also look up the status of your insurance, tell if you're wearing a seatbelt, and ding you for tailgaiting, all while sitting alone on the side of the road, relying on a wireless data connection and an internal generator to be totally self-sufficient. Whether or not this is scary depends largely on your propensity for speed, but know that the things will be getting built into police cars soon and will shortly be heading over here to our big, wide American highways
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I hate this world, granted US is not likely to get them but still...
 
and is the product of ?7 in government funding

I don't think it will work very well. :p
 
everyone hates tailgaters, everyone agrees that people not wearing seat belts should be slapped in the face, and i don't think anyone condones someone driving around without insurance

i don't see what is the problem? the only pitty is that it also checks your speed...
 
I can almost guarantee they will never be implemented in the US.

In the most recent elections there were a number of states with propositions on the ballot to ban speed cameras - I think every single one passed despite the multi-million dollar campaigns by the corporations who administer them to keep the cameras. At times the companies outspent the people by almost 10 to 1 - and they still lost by a landslide.
 
So someone took a bunch of different camera systems, invented a new one (seat belt) and put it into one system. It's a good thing that these cameras are illegal in Germany, but the rest of Europe might see them quickly.
 
So that speed camera thing checks your
  • Speed
  • Insurance
  • Usage of seatbelt
  • Distance to car in front

All of those are also checked if you happen to drive by a police car, of which speed and insurance automatically by the radar systems and computers in the car. So essentially driving by that thing is no different than driving by a police car. Only with the exception that those unmanned cameras show no mercy...
 
I think these cameras are a good idea, except for the speeding. Idiots driving around without insurance and/or their seat belts on should get caught; not normal motorists who go 5-10 km/h over the speed limit.
 
I couldn't care less if someone doesn't want to wear his seatbelt. Doesn't pose any danger to me, he takes his own life into his hands.
 
As a society, you pay his medical bills (soon?).

We still haven't quite sort that bit out :p

Still you have to draw a line somewhere. Should we ban all cars with less than 5 star crash safety? Or just all cars without air bags? Motorcyclists are required to wear a helmet. What about the rest of protective riding gear? Should you be allowed to walk on the sidewalk at night without reflective clothing?

There are a million things people do that are inherently unsafe, and I like to thing that a person suffers more from a severe injury than society paying the medical bills.

All of that said, how the hell does a camera detect a seatbelt anyway? What about lap belts? What if you're wearing black clothing and your car has a black interior?
 
All that fancy-schmancy crapola... and yet it's still just as killable as a regular old speed camera.

Not that that should even be necessary, like others have said, I don't see this ever being used.
 
Banning cars with lower-than-possible safety rating is hard. Sacrificing three seconds to put on the seat belt is easy.
Yes, you do need to draw a line somewhere. Do draw that line including seat belts though, very little effort with massive gains.


On the camera, I'd guess it takes many false positives or inconclusive pictures that need to be verified by the county/city/whatever. Even if it is smart enough to not take pictures of black on black, not everyone has black seat belts. I also would not be surprised if it did not accept a four-point harness as wearing a seat belt and take a picture that again needs to be sorted out afterwards.
 
We still haven't quite sort that bit out :p

Still you have to draw a line somewhere. Should we ban all cars with less than 5 star crash safety? Or just all cars without air bags? Motorcyclists are required to wear a helmet. What about the rest of protective riding gear? Should you be allowed to walk on the sidewalk at night without reflective clothing?

There are a million things people do that are inherently unsafe, and I like to thing that a person suffers more from a severe injury than society paying the medical bills.

All of that said, how the hell does a camera detect a seatbelt anyway? What about lap belts? What if you're wearing black clothing and your car has a black interior?

I think the bolded bit should be mandated by law, but that's another story entirely! :lol:

I have no problems with cameras that check insurance/tailgating (although that is an interesting one- hopefully it would be able to crosscheck with speed to make sure it doesn't book people who are stopped one behind the other), but I agree with thevictor390 on seatbelts (and how are you meant to prove that you were? Hopefully photos would be high enough resolution to tell if you requested the photo) and I just plain don't like speed cameras (even though I seldom speed in a car)

EDIT: and yeah, banning cars with no airbags/bad crash ratings is a bad idea. Better to do incentives to get them off the road (ala cash for clunkers), but I'm inherently biased there (aiming to benefit from the Aussie scheme for this whenever it gets introduced) and again, another story!
 
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Banning cars with lower-than-possible safety rating is hard. Sacrificing three seconds to put on the seat belt is easy.
Yes, you do need to draw a line somewhere. Do draw that line including seat belts though, very little effort with massive gains.


On the camera, I'd guess it takes many false positives or inconclusive pictures that need to be verified by the county/city/whatever. Even if it is smart enough to not take pictures of black on black, not everyone has black seat belts. I also would not be surprised if it did not accept a four-point harness as wearing a seat belt and take a picture that again needs to be sorted out afterwards.

Which means it's someone's job to sort through the crap - it's easy to take a picture that conclusively shows a person wearing a seatbelt, but it seems quite hard to prove the opposite. So let's go by your 3 second rule - is it even worth enforcing?
 
That depends on how reliable the camera's reading is. If it takes 100 pictures for 1 violator then you could argue the effort is not worth it (not even mentioning it isn't breaking even or making a profit).
 
That depends on how reliable the camera's reading is. If it takes 100 pictures for 1 violator then you could argue the effort is not worth it (not even mentioning it isn't breaking even or making a profit).

That's more or less what I'm saying. My opinion is that I severely doubt the system is reliable, but I am willing to be proven wrong. The issue of the law itself is one for another thread, sorry :lol:
 
As someone who has been hit by 2 uninsured people I fell if you are caught you get your car taken(for good), big fine, maybe jail time.
 
I'm all for taking the vehicles of people who are uninsured. They can either get insurance within 5 days or their car gets sold at auction and the proceeds are used to pay the victim of the crash (if there is one) or goes into a general fund for the victims of uninsured drivers.

It would really suck if that car wasn't paid off.
 
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