California Tracks Everyone Using Toll Transponders

obtuse writes "Direct monitoring of traffic sounds pretty cool, but some people don't want their toll transponders tracked. They aren't installing direct driver tracking for law enforcement now, but the collected data could be subpoenaed. Of course, anyone who didn't want to be tracked could just put it in the glovebox anyway, so they won't be catching clever felons or tracking real paranoiacs."

The part I don't get

[Russellkhan]

Is just what about direct monitoring of traffic sounds cool? To me it sounds roughly as cool as a mandatory government email proxy so that all email can be directly monitored (For our own protection, of course). Russ

But wait...there's more!

[pongo000]

Here in north Texas, the NTTA is the toll authority. If you drive around town, you can find Amtech transponders mounted high up on telephone poles -- miles away from the tollroads! Not only does NTTA track you on the tollway, they are apparently keeping tabs on you when you're not on the tollway.

For the non-believers in Dallas: Look in the median on Valley View, just west of Marsh in Farmers Branch.

Re:This always bothered me

[splume]

Keep this sort of talk to a minimum. Those of us who enjoy hauling-ass don't want the police to get a clue as to this sort of thing. In fact, in Europe, they do just that. Many of the larger tour buses have devices that record entrance and exit times, and the police can stop and check these devices and issue tickets on the spot.

Glove Box Won't Do it in NY

[peterdaly]

In New York State, an "EZPass" must be in a special bag for it not to be read. Looks like an anti-static bag and it may be, I don't know.

I know people who have tried to get the thing to not be read (to get a reciept in order to expense tolls for work) and without the bag it is very hard to "hide."

The poor design of the system means it can screw you at times if you don't do what is the expected traffic pattern. I was told once at the toll booth getting on that since my EZPass had been read, I was unable to turn around and must now get on the truway going the wrong direction and proceed to another exit or be faced with a $30 fine for illegal U-TURN. Problem was an accident closed the on ramp for the direction I needed to go.

(I turned around at the next "NO U TURNS" turn around to go the direction I needed to once I had though out how the system worked and knew the turn would not be "detected" by the crappy EZPass system.) Also, it takes at least 24 hours for a credit on your pass to work at most ramps.

The system in NYS sucks technically. I am quite worried about it being used for speed enforcement purposes and such.

-Pete

Re:Automatic tickets coming up soon

[pongo000]

Growing up in the NE, we often traversed the Penn. State Turnpike. Back then, they gave you a punch card (Hollerith card for you purists) at the entrance booth, and you handed to the attendant when you exited. If your calculated speed was above a certain limit, you were referred to a Penn. state trooper waiting at the booth for a "consultation."

My father was a cop, so it was never a big deal, professional courtesy and all that...

Re:I can live with that.

[garett_spencley]

I expect the option of anonymity and privacy and identity and freedom etc.

It's all about choice and freedom. If I want to be anonymous in a so-called "free" country I should. If I want privacy I should be entitled to that as well. As well as anything else that I damn well please as long as it's within the scope of myself and no one else.

Should no one be allowed these things?

Wether I'm actually going to make use of them or not if irrelevant. As long as they're available to me then that's all that matters.

--
Garett

Point A - B ticketing system in Australia already

[Nazghal]

Some years back i was involved in the Safe T Cam system in australia, which is basically a road safety system for heavy vehicles. It was actually a little more sinister than tag tracking. It used some logic to identify the "size" of an oncoming vehicle, and for large vehicles it would use OCR to identify the number plate. This was logged along with a time stamp, across the state there were several such points. If the same number plate was identified at two distant points within a certain time, alarms were triggered. These were then used to investigate the driver in questions log books (truck drivers must take certain rest breaks by law, and over large interstate distances, getting from point A to B in a certain time meant they were either speeding, or not taking mandatory breaks or both). While the ticketing wasnt automatic, it is only a short step from it, and for that matter it could theoretically by turned on for all vehicles quite easily..

Big brother watches...

Re:This always bothered me

[jpmorgan]

In fact, France almost completely relies on correlating the times between toll stations to catch speeders. It's why when you're driving in France you see a lot of people with flashy cars at the side of the road eating lunch or talking for a bit just outside of the toll stations. =)

Re:Automatic tickets coming up soon

[cpeterso]

what if the clocks at each endpoint are not properly synchronized? you might be able to challenge the ticket claiming the second clock was a few minutes "slow".

Calculus

[AJWM]

That reminds me of a really strange movie we saw back in first year calculus class. (Yeah, movies in math class. Weird in itself.)

Had to do with just such a situation, with the driver being referred to the cop for speeding. The trooper proceeds to explain Rolle's Theorem and Mean Value Theorem to the driver as proof that somewhere in between the two toll booths, he had to have been speeding.

I guess to the extent that I remember the name of Rolle's Theorem, the movie served its purpose. OTOH it always seemed kind of intuitively obvious to me.

This won't solve traffic congestion

[guttentag]

The traffic sensor system, which should begin operating next month, will make it possible to provide realtime information about some of the nation's worst congestion to drivers through their cell phones, over the airwaves and on the Internet, and gather better data for transportation planners.

In theory, it can only be effective if it does not provide drivers with the real-time data.

Let's say this system goes into effect, and it can track traffic in real time and provide that data to the people who are causing the traffic. Everyone on the road figures he's smarter than the drivers around him (I can confirm this mentality is the norm in Northern California, where this is being implemented). Drivers on US 101 simultaneously get a report from their cell phones that they're facing bumper-to-bumper traffic from Moffett Field to University Ave, and people respond by getting off the highway and flooding Middlefield Road, which runs parallel to 101. Only this causes Middlefield to become even more congested than 101 (which is still congested because Middlefield just can't handle that much traffic). So some people abandon Middlefield to go back to 101, causing more problems, while a steady stream of cars begins to work its way through the side streets around Middlefield. The end result is that no one really gets to their destination any faster (this actually increases travel time for many people as they hop between routes).

More importantly, the data becomes useless. If the drivers had not been supplied with the raw traffic information, they would have followed predictable traffic patterns that could be studied to determine where roads need to be widened or otherwise changed (any Bay Area commuters familiar with the northern end of 85 can already tell you where roads need to be changed). Since the otherwise sheep-like traffic now has thousands of minds of its own, the result is chaotic traffic in which patterns constantly change unpredictably as people try to adapt. Therefore patterns cannot be studied and the flow of traffic will not improve.

Ideally, the system should analyze the patterns without providing raw data to the drivers and suggest that drivers whose license numbers end in 4 or 8 take Middlefield, drivers whose license numbers end in 5, 6 or 7 should take 280 if possible, and everyone else should stay on 101. Intelligently-managed traffic is better than chaotic traffic.

Re:Automatic tickets coming up soon

[Ironica]

Oklahoma was the last state to repeal Prohibition. They voted on it every few years, but decided they liked looking so virtuous compared to the rest of the nation. You could get alcohol, of course, as you could during national prohibition.

When my mother was a child (born in 1943) a man ran for governor, and let everyone know that he opposed the state prohibition law, but if he was elected, he would enforce the law strictly. He won, and within weeks of his taking office, you couldn't get a drop of liquor anywhere in the state.

The next time prohibition came up to vote, it was struck down.

If everyone suffered from equal enforcement of stupid or unfair laws, we'd have a lot fewer of them. As it is, drug laws, unreasonable traffic laws, and so on are often an excuse to pick up "suspicious" folks who haven't done anything more wrong than that white guy over there, except they were born with the wrong look.

If everyone in California could expect to get a ticket every time they went over the posted limit (be it 55, 65, or 70 now on some roads) the very next election would see an initiative referendum overwhelmingly pass to modify speed laws.

Tollways and speeding tickets based on timestamps

[Nonesuch]

There were rumors that the Indiana Toll Road authority would issue speeding tickets to drivers based on the time taken to get from your on-ramp (where you are issued a ticket showing where you entered the system) to your exit ramp (where your toll fee is calculated based on the distance from where you entered.

We avoided the issue by always "losing" the ticket between where we entered and the exit ramp. The "lost ticket" penalty was that you pay the maximum toll fee, which was fine by us, as that was the toll we would be paying even if we hadn't "lost" the ticket.

My theory is that the rumors were started to increase toll revenues :)

dutky from the Toll Collection Agency writes:

Even on a closed loop system, you can only calculate the average speed in the system. Under heavy traffic conditions, the average speed is likely never to exceed the posted speed limit! (this is the sad truth about speeding: it rarely benefits the speed but, occasionally, it is a great harm to an innocent bystander) You can pretty easily wipe out the extra time you gained by speeding while waiting to at the exit toll plaza.

Faulty logic. Yes, I "wipe out the extra time ... gained by speeding" from the wait to exit at the toll plaza.

Except, the guy who doesn't speed is going to have taken that much longer to arrive at the exit, and will have exactly the same wait as I did!

So if I drive 85 on the toll road and wait five minutes to exit my average speed for the trip drops below 55. But the guy who drove 55 for the same distance waits the same five minutes...

By the "speed kills" logic, we should just set the maximum speed on all public roads to 5 MPH so as to all but eliminate deaths from pedestrian-vehicle accidents.

I can't believe no one mentioned this

[smiff]

John Gilmore is suing for the right to fly anonymously. Many of the questions brought up in his FAQ [cryptome.org] have a direct parallel to this issue.

Q. Why is anonymity so important to the right to travel?

Most travel is for meeting other people. I fly to see my family, you fly on business, she flies to meet her best friend, he flies for a romantic vacation with his sweetheart, she flies to a conference, they fly to a political event. Meeting with people is part of "free association", which just means being free to associate with whoever you want to.

Undemocratic governments traditionally try to prevent people from associating anonymously, because most credible challenges to government policies occur from groups of people who meet and agree to work together. Racist Southern states passed laws 50 years ago to require the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to give its membership list to the state -- so that the members could be harassed or killed by Ku Klux Klan members who were often local racist politicians and law enforcement officers. The Supreme Court struck down those laws. The NAACP was able to gather broad support for changing our racial policies, and we had a relatively peaceful transition to a much less racist society. These racist governments wanted to scare people away from joining the reform movements, either by harassing existing members, or by making people afraid to join. If they had gotten their way, we would still have terrible racial policies, or the people most affected by those policies would have had to resort to violence to get the policies changed. If the government had a database tracking the movements of NAACP leaders and those who attended its rallies and events, then the government could harass the organization without ever getting the membership list.

In addition, the First Amendment gives us the right to petition our government for redress of grievances. We can petition anonymously, and sometimes we must, when seeking to change draconian laws that the government would like to apply to us. A small number of the people who protested the WTO in Seattle were violent, but that is no excuse for seeking to identify WTO protesters in general, or to prevent them from traveling to the next anti-WTO protest. If the government could track everyone who flew to Seattle that week, and mark them as suspected terrorists, then their freedom to anonymously petition would be violated.

As Americans, we are pretty smug about our freedom; we don't even think about how we would take it back if suddenly a planned demonstration or political meeting was "canceled" because 90% of the attendees had been mysteriously stopped from flying or driving or taking the train or bus to attend. But the "transportation security" system and the profiling and databases behind it are all poised and ready to do exactly that. All it will take is a bureaucrat or politician who says "Do it", because all the mechanisms will already be built. It was only 60 years ago that hundreds of thousands of Americans were imprisoned solely for their Japanese cultural heritage. Only 40 years ago that anti-war and civil rights protesters were bugged, followed, smeared, arrested, impersonated, and disrupted by the supposedly lawful government. Only 30 years ago that a Republican President was bugging the Democratic National Committee. Only ten years ago that our prison population was half what it is today, with the increase coming from imprisoning black and Latino innocents over victimless crimes like drug use. Only two years ago that a Presidential election was stolen. I'm not talking about a banana republic somewhere else; I'm talking about our own country. Abuse of government surveillance, and suppresison of unpopular minorities, are documented facts right here in the US, not unrealistic or remote fears.