A item in today's Daily Telegraph reports the following
"Trials by Transport for London have shown a potential weakness of a satellite link to a "black box". The study, on 108 miles of roads in the City of London and Southwark, had cars fitted with a "black box" to collect journey information.
In all, 17 firms' technology was tested in two weeks. When they used their own systems to calculate charges there was a 6.7 per cent error in bills and a 5.4 per cent error in length of journeys.
According to the study the greatest problem was "location error", with the car being incorrectly tracked."
I am not going to £600+ to have something that inaccurate put in my car!
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Some clever person will find a way of bypassing the black box.
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Full article here
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007...l
As Xileno says, there will be devices available within weeks to block or scramble the signals.
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Will the same black box fit all cars, old and new?
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There has been some discussion of potential problems with older cars which had positive earth electrical systems (or whatever old cars have) and some old cars had 6 volt systems - old VWs. How are the fitters of these devices going to get into the electrical system to power them and where are they going to be put in the car! Ten of thousands of different fittings needed; I don't see it happening or, if it happens, I don't see it working!
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"there will be devices available within weeks to block or scramble the signals"
Removing the fuse (or, more subtly, substituting a blown one) should do it...
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Something I've not seen discussed is the bandwidth/capacity of the GPS satellites. Presumably there is a limit to how many interrogations they can handle. They were originally designed for low-volume military use IIRC.
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GPS is passive, It has no bandwidth. It interrogates nothing, it cant, its just a bunch of transmitters.
The black box will use GPS location data, and transmit its data via some other means, mobile phone network perhaps, or some other means.
But honestly, for mass checkin, using a black box to do something is a non starter, Receiving system wont cope, far too easy to cripple or corrupt the device. There is only ONE sure way to do road pricing.
Roadside monitoring of some kind. That could be ANPR cameras, or RFID tags in number plates, or some form of TAG.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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Allegedly galileo will be more accurate than GPS, with a stronger signal, so presumably they're hoping the accuracy of road pricing will be higher in the future.
Of course it's only as accurate as the maps they have, so there's another possibility for inaccuracy.
My worry if this is ever implemented is how on earth I'm supposed to budget for my travel costs when individual roads at different times of the day will vary wildly in price.
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If the car mounted balck box emits a signal stating where irt is to a receiving station, I can easily see this being converted to a "location: home" signal.....
The amount of money and time could be spent on.. building a few bypasses for congestion areas.. but that's too simple ....
madf
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Well if the sytem is going to be based onGalileo it isn't likely to happen!
Despite the fanfares which greeted the launch, courtesy of a Russian Soyuz rocket, of the EU's first trial satellite last year, it is now clear that Galileo's future is fraught with difficulty. Within a few years Russia and China will join the US in having their own global positioning satellite systems, free to users all over the world. Galileo alone will depend on charging users for an encrypted signal, and since Cornell University last year cracked its operating code, the commercial future of the system looks increasingly uncertain.
As Galileo's development bills soar, it cannot even be guaranteed to become operational, although Mr Alexander has already promised £2.5 billion to local authorities by 2015, under his Transport Innovation Fund, so long as they agree to charge for road use. Our Government is thus locked into a hugely unpopular and complex project which we cannot have any assurance will work.
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tracking devices have been fitted to lorries for yonks, specially the one carrying booze and fags ,you know the ones with vacuum cleaner products advertised on their sides
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tracking devices have been fitted to lorries for yonks, specially the one carrying booze and fags ,you know the ones with vacuum cleaner products advertised on their sides
Yup, thats fine for a fleet of 500 or 1,000 lorries. You can set up a system to track them no problem.
Now multiply that to 12 million users, all at the same time (rush hour), spread across the country, with different tarrifs, linking into billing system, to send out bills, deduct from Bacs, and process the fines and backlog.
Its not the same as tracking a fleet of lorries.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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isnt it a fact that the police have been able to implicate a felon at the scene of a crime by data from their mobile phone, so dont make sweeping statements that this technology will never work to road price car users!
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Accuracy is the issue, not ability to locate someone within a few metres of a phone mast. From my experience of using GPS (accurate to within 10m or so at best) it's not uncommon for it to put me on a road running parallel to the one I'm actually on. With different charges for different roads it's easy to see discrepancies all through the system.
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what's this accuracy of 10mtrs? we and a lot of others have a gps guidance system on tractors which is accurate to less than 1ft from the free egnos sattelite and will give guidance to sub 4inches with a subscriber sattelite. by the way i'm dead against road pricing. jag.
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Not at the scene of a crime - in the area of a crime. SFAIK the phone system can tell which 'cell' you are in. The size of these cells varies with location but are thet are small in an urban area and larger in the countryside and out of town.
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It will be very interesting to see what kind of bill you will receive. Surely it will have to detail each road you travelled on with date and time plus the charge band for that road. Multiply that by 28/30/31 days each month and it will cost them a fortune to send out the bills. How many trees will that lot cost? Then again if they intend to bill you "on-line", so to speak, we have nothing to worry about 'cos (a) the govt. cannot get any computer system running (b) umpteen million e-mail each month will crash the already overloaded system. Fear not
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The Government (of any flavour) will contract this out to one of the major consultancy firms (watch for lots of ex-ministers appearing as consultants) who will probably employ the entire population of India in call-centres to sort out the queries.
It?s pretty clear who will benefit from such an enterprise, and it won?t be you and me.
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geoff1248,
All of your points were made repeatedly about the London Congestion Charge - technology won't work, government can't implement it, it will bury the existing systems, etc. etc.
The government can get ANY system running. They usually spend 100 times more than anybody else would to do the same think and frequently lose interest and give up before they've finished. But if they want it running, it *will* be running.
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The civil service will have a 'pilot scheme'. Thing is, when I worked for her majesty it was not the done thing to have a pilot fail on you, as this may harm the career of the pilot-er. Therefore most pilots produce 'fudged' statistics that prove it works, and can be introduced nationally (or whatever). Of course, when expanded the difficulties that were fudged over become much magnified and jump up to bite the behind of the pilot-ers successors, the pilot-er having long since been promoted on the strength of the original succes.
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>>I am not going to £600+ to have something that inaccurate put in my car!<<
You will do whatever President Blair tells you I'm afraid or walk.
Since when did we live in a democracy ?
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The civil service will have a 'pilot scheme'. Thing is, when I worked for her majesty it was not the done thing to have a pilot fail on you, as this may harm the career of the pilot-er. Therefore most pilots produce 'fudged' statistics that prove it works, and can be introduced nationally (or whatever). Of course, when expanded the difficulties that were fudged over become much magnified and jump up to bite the behind of the pilot-ers successors, the pilot-er having long since been promoted on the strength of the original succes.
will the pilot-er be promoted to wing commander-er
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