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Raspberry Pi Car Speed Detector

(gregtinkers.wordpress.com)
187 points mhss | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
1. peatmoss ◴[] No.11715341[source]
Nice! Combine this with license plate recognition, and you have the start of an open platform for traffic safety that is both awesome and deeply creepy.

I've thought about a platform that collects speeds of vehicles and then publishes a database of speeds matched to license plates as an open data set. Police would likely not touch it, but a large enough database might be a tantalizing prize for automobile insurance companies. And then my desire for more disincentives for speeding runs afoul of my feelings about dragnet surveillance, and so I abandon it.

In terms of having the potential to effect direct action against speeders, I don't know how effective simply monitoring speeds would be. That said, some cities (such as Seattle) will lend speed profiling equipment to community groups in order to establish whether or not a given segment of road might be a candidate for traffic calming: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/ntcp_calming.htm

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2. Perixoog ◴[] No.11716787[source]
You could just use licence plate recognition x2 and measure average speeds instead.
3. pjc50 ◴[] No.11717383[source]
The UK has an insurance lookup database, although you're only supposed to use it on your own car: http://ownvehicle.askmid.com/

I've been wondering if it would be possible to combine that with ANPR to give a dashboard-level indicator of uninsured vehicles to watch out for.

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4. ◴[] No.11718067[source]
5. kmm ◴[] No.11718178[source]
That sounds insanely illegal as well. I don't know about the US, but I think in most places in the EU it's illegal to even post videos of people driving dangerously or way too fast online.
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6. toomuchtodo ◴[] No.11718528[source]
No expectation of privacy in public in the US. Its fair game.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Roadcam

7. ddmf ◴[] No.11720555[source]
That's an excellent idea. Far too often the driver in front appears to be driving strangely so you drop back a bit and hope they or you turn off so you don't have to be hypervigilant about their driving.

If there was an automated way of dobbing a driver in to the police then this would be useful too - quick tweet/email/text with the message: uninsured vehicle AB12 CDE travelling at 35mph location 51°29'51.3"N 0°08'06.4"W