"tim....." wrote in
:

And as I've already said, I believe that once we have this database it
could/should be used for UK residents travelling on foreign tolled
roads also collected using this method, though I can see that we need
some form of protection here for cloned plates (and genuine mistakes)
as I can't see it being easy to persuade a CZ (for example) toll
collected that your car really was in the UK when they claim that you
drove down their motorway

There are a number of issues with this, though maybe not insurmountable
ones.

The first is that ANPR is quite difficult, and really only works
acceptably reliably if you confine it to the font, colours, format,
spacing and so on of a single country's standard. This has improved
steadily over the last 20 years but there is still a gap between the
performance of one-country systems and all-country ones[1].

Secondly, once you've spotted car ABC 123, you need to check with every
country in Europe where ABC 123 is a valid sequence to find out who owns
it - and there may be more than one match as registration marks are not
unique across Europe. A central European database would help this, but
there are formidable (= expensive) legal and practical obstacles to
setting that up and keeping it up to date.

Thirdly, you have to persuade the villain to cough up. As failure to
pay is a civil matter (at least in the UK) it is possible, but again
expensive, to pursue miscreants through the courts, but you have few
real sanctions at your disposal if they still refuse to pay.

However, your point about people claiming to be in the UK when they were
spotted on a CZ toll road is partially mitigated by ANPR cameras also
taking a 'context' picture of you with a bit of recognisable background.
This may or may not be of evidential quality, but quite a number of
culprits suddenly remember they were indeed there when faced with having
to explain that away.

There is quite a lot of enthusiasm (and some opposition) in government,
the EC, industry and trade bodies (hauliers etc) for doing this and a
number of studies have been undertaken, but to date the projected costs
have been too great to justify proceeding. But I think it will happen
in time.

Peter

[1] The original tender for the London CC scheme required recognition of
multiple alphabets including potentially Greek, Arabic, and Cyrillic
(although thankfully not Chinese). I don't believe anyone put in a
truly compliant bid.

--
|| Peter CS ~ Epsom ~ UK | pjcs02 [at] gmail.com |