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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Request what? The surveillance system? No. That said many on HN where strong proponents of it when it was announced because it was marketed as providing data the city government could use to make improvements.

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Improvements to what?

Serious question.

Traffic congestion by studying the build-up of traffic at certain lights

I call bullshit. Pneumatic road tubes have been around for a while to gather data about traffic flows.

Cameras can be at every intersection all the time and can adapt in real-time to emerging traffic patterns (ie a ballgame ending and a stadium of people hitting the road at once) as well as traffic changes over time from environmental changes

Why can't pneumatic tubes do this?

Or inductive sensors

...which would required correlating what they're seeing with outside data. That's not something /inherent/ to the device.

If you're going to correlate datasets, you could just as easily do it with your sports/weather data and pneumatic tube data.

A camera is cheaper and a camera can measure speed as well as slowdowns and stoppages that a tube simply can't do. A tube was the old way but if you're going to make a new device a camera makes more sense.

Thing is, that really isn't much of a problem in downtown SD where most of these cameras are.

TFA said they wanted to account for parking spaces where people had vacated their parking space before their paid time was up.

That would be like McDonalds digging through the trash to account for the uneaten food.

I wonder where this kind of accounting goes on the balance sheet? Maybe part of the Richard Pryor fund?

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