Quite dystopian if you ask me. Is it not enough that there are police officers and speed traps on the ground, now you have to fear to be watched from the skies all day as well?
How often do you not know whose driving your car?
Speeding tickets in Belgium are part of the government budget. That on its own should make you think about why they make it so hard to defend yourself.
And a picture of a license plate proves just that. The plate was there. I shouldn't have to keep record who drove my car. Especially not 4 weeks ago when the letter gets to my mailbox. Nor should I be required to rat out others.
Speaking of dystopias, I'm surprised that they don't issue speeding tickets based on the time that EZ-PASS sees your transponder in various locations. They must imagine too much backlash, or tacitly endorse some speeding already. (I've never seen someone get a ticket for going 60 in a 55, though I'm sure it must happen.)
Something like this happened with TomTom several years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/04/28/135809709...
They don't want to do this. Toll systems are set up as private corporations (often with government money) so that they can operate for-profit, and are a tacit "Speeding Pass". E.g. usually there is no enforcement in toll lanes / toll roads for speed limits compared to standard roads. They do this very specifically as an enticement for people to pay in order to get to their destination faster, that is the entire USP (unique selling proposition) to a toll road.
If they started using toll data to automatically enforce speed limits, it would immediately making tolling impossible/unsustainable, and nobody would use transponder systems. There's already issues with people cheating tolls using various methods to obscure their license plate for systems which support license plate tolling.
Safety regulations are just the justification for why it's necessary.
The income from fines is the real reason it's done.
You say "at all times" but like I said, this surveillance is limited to the times when you are operating your privately owned heavy machinery on public roads (which have posted signs regarding aircraft).
> The income from fines is the real reason it's done.
The article even explicitly says that the economics of aircraft doesn't work out for tickets. It's not about revenue, nor evil gov't surveillance. It's about public safety.
It's like the state equivalent of a corporation screwing some fraction of the people it does business with out of a few bucks knowing that suing doesn't make sense and they're under the threshold for a lucrative class action.
I speed, effectively every day, just as do most other people, because many roads still have a speed limit of 55mph from the 1960s and the expected (and safe, partly because of this) speed on these roads is 70-80mph.
Dangerous drivers are the MANY people I see every day who are on their phones, not looking at the road, with bad lane-keeping practices, who change lanes without using blinkers, or make erratic and sudden movements.
Dangerous drivers are the MANY people I see every day who tailgate and then pass aggressively via weaving between lanes, passing on the right.
Dangerous drivers are the MANY people I see every day who camp in the left lane while going significantly below the expected average speed for the lane, causing some people to feel it necessary to pass them on the right and obstructing the flow of traffic.
Speeding probably isn't good, but it's not even in the top 5 things I would be most concerned about on public roadways in the US from a safety perspective.
As a passenger or another driver on the roadway, I'd much rather be surrounded by attentive drivers with both hands on the wheel who are speeding than inattentive drivers with one hand on the wheel and the other on their phone watching a Tik Tok video and texting their friends while cruise control is set.
From a quick googling speed is listed as a factor in 29% of fatal accidents. Plus if you're already breaking one driving law, chances are you're breaking several more.
This isn't some conspiracy theory. Governments all over use speed fines as part of their budget, it is absolutely within reason to think that they also set up the rules in such a way as to get the outcome they want.