On Sat, 1 Apr 2006 09:22:30 +0100, Whinging Courier
wrote:

In uk.transport.london, purple pete belched forth and ejected the
following:


"Whinging Courier" wrote in message
t...
They're gatso-yellow in colour, they're on longer poles than gastos and
I've seen at least five brand new installations in the last two days at
least.

Some are covered in polythene, some aren't. Some have datum lines, some
haven't.

Are these new digital speed cameras? They're in some very unlikely
places if they are. I saw one in Rosalynn Hill, NW3 today. Going up!

If this is in Camden Town I think they are doing a trial of SPECS cameras on
some estate to cut speeding down to 20MPH I think.

They don't look like SPECS cameras, or at least they don't look like
motorway SPECS cameras.

They look a lot like mini versions of the Limehouse Link cameras but as
they're in such unlikely places, I did wonder.

There's one appeared on the Hammersmith Road westbound just after the
Hammersmith Gyratory in the last two weeks. To me it looks like a bus
lane camera (quite a small box) but as you say it is on a *much*
taller post than a regular speed camera or bus lane camera, and is
bright yellow (the camera unit - the post is standard gray). Besides
there is no bus lane at that point. As far as I can see there is no
way to easily lower it to the ground (to change film etc) so it must
be digital. It is covered in plastic bagging so I could be wrong.

Against the nearest building a cabinet has been installed at the same
time (like a traffic light control cabinet) which is definitely linked
to the new camera. It's quite a big cabinet, so taking this to mean
the camera needs "brains", and the small size of the actual camera,
I'm with the guy that calls SPECS. However, I'm at a loss as to where
the matching pair for it is in that case. It might be somewhere on
Kensington High Street but if so I haven't noticed it, or it may be
that it hasn't gone up yet.

Unless they are not going up in pairs like traditional SPECS ...
perhaps it is some massive London-wide SPECS system where they measure
your journey time between *any* two cameras.

If it is SPECS-style, I'm 99% in favour. People speed along
Hammersmith Road *all the time* (it's a 30mph road) and I've seen a
fair few nasty accidents and near accidents in the last six years;
however a conventional GATSO would do nothing as the scum would just
slow down past the camera itself and then speed up again; SPECS should
keep them to 30mph all the way along the monitored zone. My 1% against
is because all camera schemes encourage false number plates (which are
nowhere near as hard to obtain as you might think) which makes
tracking other road offences difficult.