The Risk Factor

When the new $8 billion Terminal 5 opens in March of next year at London's Heathrow airport, you won't have to worry about remembering where you park your car. According to a story in USA Today, infrared cameras and sensors will be capturing a car's license plate as it enters the terminal's parking garage, and as the car makes its way inside the garage, additional cameras will be monitoring it. Cameras will also take a picture of where each car eventually ends up parking.

When passengers return from a flight, they can go to a kiosk and either enter their parking ticket or license plate number. The location of their car will then be displayed on a diagram of the parking terminal.

The parking garage will also have information telling passengers where there is open parking. You can read a story about smart parking technology in a story I wrote for IEEE Spectrum on-line here.

In a related parking story, also from USA Today, it seems that because parking is at such a premium in many areas of Britain, that fast-food restaurants like McDonald's are warning customers to eat up in 45 minutes or risk a parking fine of $150, while supermarkets and department stores, including British retail giant Tesco, are warning shoppers they too will be fined if they park for more than two or three hours. Just like at Heathrow, cameras are being used to identify the cars overstaying the parking time limits.

This week the Chicago Daily Herald ran a three-part series called "Toll Gridlock" that reported on the problems with the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority's collection system. The series found that the toll authority is often "sending violation notices to the wrong addresses, leaving some drivers to miss out on chances to pay up before fines skyrocket or their driver's licenses are suspended."

In one case, a driver didn't know her I-PASS (electronic toll payment transponder) ran out of money and accumulated $179.50 in owed tolls. She was sent a letter saying she now owes $4,619, and had better pay up in two weeks, or owe the tollway $15,739 and eventually lose her driver's license.

The series also notes that "tollway officials say their license plate image readers have trouble discerning differences among the myriad of plate varieties, affecting about 25 percent of all plates on the road. This may result in fines being leveled against law-abiding motorists."

In addition, the series states that the toll authority doesn't know how many are cheating or how many motorists are being fined unfairly.

Finally, the series notes that the toll authority's management thinks all of the problems are minor, and that the way fines are assessed is "fair."

Glad I don't drive in Illinois.

When I used to live in the UK, having an A - Z guide was mandatory for getting around. The UK is one of those countries that seems to have an attitude that if you are lost, you deserve to be. My memory is that I could always find a sign telling you were leaving a county, town or village, but not that you were ever entering one.

The UK attitude towards (not) providing clear directions on road signs seems to have extended to some of its former colonies like Virginia where I now live, where having an ADC map is absolutely vital if you want to get around without wandering in circles.

Anyway, IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Joshua Romero pointed me to a story in the London Telegraph about the proliferation of GPS navigation in the UK, and the problems they are creating in the UK. It seems that Network Rail claims that 2,000 railroad crossing and bridges are hit annually - some 6 or 7 a day - by trucks that have been directed along inappropriate roads for their size. Network Rail said that it was now mapping the UK’s low bridges and level crossings so that information could be fed into GPS navigation software.

Part of the reason is that many of the trucks are being driven by non-English speaking drivers, who rely almost exclusively on the navigation system for guidance. Network Rails says that, "We are now trialling smart signs complete with laser detectors which will tell oncoming vehicles that they won't clear the bridge ahead."

It is not only Network Rail that is having problems. Small towns and villages are finding that trucks and coaches driving down roads and country lanes are also smacking into buildings and cottages, or getting stuck and blocking local traffic. Some village councils are now posting anti-satellite navigation system signs up.

Back in 2006, the UK Department for Transport supposedly was going to develop a "star rating system" that would tell consumers how reliable GPS navigation systems were, but I am not sure of its status. Still too soon to throw out those A -Z guides just yet, I reckon.

A few months back, I wrote about how the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority was sending violation notices to the wrong addresses, leaving some drivers to miss out on the opportunity to pay their fines before the fines dramatically increased or their driver's licenses were suspended.

Now the Toll Authority's new computer system used to check vehicles traveling on the Illinois tollway using the I-PASS (electronic toll payment transponder) was found to have a software problem that affected Wisconsin drivers.

According to an AP story, Wisconsin I-Pass users whose transponders didn't register when going through a toll (as sometimes happens) didn't match up properly during a tollway enforcement system validation cross-check between Illinois and Wisconsin I-Pass records. As a result, the Wisconsin drivers got a fine for using an "expired" I-Pass transponder or for not owning one at all.

The root cause of the problem was, according to the story, that "the new Illinois computer system allowed Wisconsin drivers signing up for the I-PASS to identify their vehicle as a 'passenger' car. But Wisconsin records listed the license plates as an 'auto.' " The incompatibility was why the databases didn't sync up when checked and Wisconsin drivers got whacked even though they had working I-Pass transponders.

Why the incompatibility existed in the first place wasn't explained.

No one seems to know how many Wisconsin drivers have been affected, either, and it will take at least another six months before the situation can be cleared up.