noPhoto

[Bert]

4th largest city in n America? Holy cow. See what happens when big American cities go broke, while broke Canadian cities forcefully amalgamate with their wealthy satellite towns. I don't think anybody knows where Hogtown begins or ends anymore thanks to lousy planning and rampant sprawl. I think that Canada allows in 1/4 million immigrants every year and most of them set up shop in Toronto. Montreal sure doesn't because your kids have to be raised in French and Vancouver gets all of the rich Asians.

[scitzz]

You could test whether the cameras are guarded from IR light. Mount a few ultra"bright" IR LED's next to your plate, power them up, and go past one of the cameras, wait and see if you get the bill. If not, it blotted out the picture in the same manner, with no real effort.

[AlaskaFestivaGuy]

Machine reading of license plates is not new. More than 5 years ago, I was tooling up the M-1 out of London (UK) in a rental Fiat econobox, and pulled into the median rest area to eat. During the merge back onto the motorway, I noticed a sign that read something like "While you were here, we photographed your vehicle, including its license plate. If you did anything wrong, we know who you are and will find you."

[bravekozak]

Like these?

Boingboing.

U.R.A./ Filoart

[Bert]

Machine reading of license plates is not new. More than 5 years ago, I was tooling up the M-1 out of London (UK) in a rental Fiat econobox, and pulled into the median rest area to eat. During the merge back onto the motorway, I noticed a sign that read something like "While you were here, we photographed your vehicle, including its license plate. If you did anything wrong, we know who you are and will find you."

I am led to believe that London has more security cameras per capita than anywhere in the world and your observation certainly doesn't dispel that notion. No doubt this leads to all sorts of pranks. Years back Ontario installed remote cameras to catch speeders. Mischievous drivers would deliberately obscure their plates and zoom past as fast as they could to infuriate the bureaucrats that down-loaded the images knowing full well nothing could be done without proper plate ID.