Singapore to increase road capacity by tracking all vehicles with GPS Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) estimated last week that by tracking all vehicles with GPS it will be able to increase road capacity by 20,000 over the next few years. The densely populated island state is moving from what it calls Electric Road Pricing (ERP) 1.0 to ERP 2.0. The first version used gantries – or …
This is totally not a government usurping power over its citizens.
"It's for a good cause!" many will say. And it may be, but the public benefits are far-outweighed by the public detriments -- even though many/most citizens do not value their fast-diminishing privacy and freedoms.
This is totally not a government usurping power over its citizens.
Are you familiar with Singapore? "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" (the 1993 William Gibson article that got Wired magazine banned there).
Singapore has always taken a close interest in it's citizen's doings. The internet and cell networks are heavily monitored, mildly anti-social behaviour (by US standards) will get you arrested.
Monitoring car movements is basically irrelevant given that Singapore car ownership is the preserve of the wealthy and taxi/limo businesses. It's a city-state island with the highest population density in the world after Macau and Monaco. If any significant proportion of the population tried to make cars their main form of transport the place would grind to a halt. Nothing is more than an hour away from anywhere else on the 24/7 fully-automated metro (worst case scenario of going West-East tip-to-tip is about 90minutes, but that's not a real journey anyone would make outside a contrived day-visit by someone landing at the airport, visiting the western industrial quarter and then going straight back to the airport.
Of course someone will then say "ah, but the Government can shut down the metro to stop protests or prevent people moving around". To those, I would merely suggest they look at the number of major roads (and bridges) in Singapore and how easy it would be for the Police to also shut those down. If you want to go "off grid", then you're inevitably on foot or cycling.
Again. It's a city state. Cars simply aren't a part of most people's lifestyle (and in the circumstances, it's better for it. Private cars cannot support population densities of 7,800/km2).
Plenty of middle class people there have cars.
Not to really disagree, but at best some of the middle class. Singapore has 6million people and 600k cars (a chunk of which are taxis/limos). So 1-per-10-people, which is fantastically lower than (say) the UK with 35m cars between 70m people.
There are 1.5m households, so it's roughly a car for every third household. So not the super-wealthy, but cars are certainly a discretionary luxury, and (outside the super-rich) mostly only one-car-per-household rather than per-adult.
People do have cars, but there is perhaps a much more healthy relationship with cars akin to the Dutch (with similar car ownership levels to the UK) where they have a car for IKEA runs, heavy shopping trips or whatnot but then get on their bike/bus if they're going into work carrying only a laptop and lunch. Which - as we seem to agree - is as it should be in a city state with fantastic public transport.
Yeah, because Singapore is a bad place to live in and they all have a shitty life.
It's not like they have the highest standard of living, or a stellar healthcare with universal coverage, or a public education system that is so good that adding "Singapore" to any private teaching prep system here in the US adds several zeroes to the cost - NONE OF THAT :)
Usurping is the key. Poor them. Lucky us.
now matter how sophisticated the tech, its still digital ... all built on quicksand
life is analogue/messy/shades of grey/conflicting/hypocritical .... one of evolutions shitty but successful tricks!
the east lacks true dirty messy imperfect western type semi-democracy with its continous low level "anarchy".... that just trundles along
as the effects of speeded up climate change increase i know where i'd rather be!
imagine if boris or starmers son daughter succeeded them or u cud never write anything bad about them or ridicule them without a knock on the door, or suddently finding yourself unemployable .. just creating a powder keg!
GPS interference is real. Russia is doing it in the Baltic causing problems for the Finns and Balts. A black hat could make it look like cars are driving in the Straits. What happens if the link to the GPS satellite breaks down? or if war breaks down and only the US is allowed the accurate sort of GPS?
I’m a runner, I have trialled a GPS run tracker on my phone. There are high retaining walls and I run under things. When it loses the signal it draws a straight line from the last position to the new one. So on a corner approaching home it has me running through a house.
I use a Polar footpod to measure pace and distance instead. It notes every footfall. I know where I’ve been and I’m not into posting it on social media.
"it has me running through a house." - only because the code's been written that way. It could integrate a map overlay, accelerometer data and footpod data to infer that you used the road/footapath and didn't run through a building.
For the purposes of ERP it needs to know you've entered a charging area - which doesn't need resolution of a few feet - or how many miles you've done, in which case corner cutting would benefit the user, not the operator.
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