Movements of Pedestrians and Vehicles in Inner-city Liverpool To Be Captured by Cameras and Smartphones To Help Local Council Map Potential Tweaks To Streets

Jacob Saulwick, reporting for The Sydney Morning Herald: The movement of pedestrians and vehicles in inner-city Liverpool will be captured by upgraded CCTV cameras and smartphones. The project, part-funded by the federal government's $50 million "Smart Cities" program, aims to help the local council map potential tweaks to streets and planning rules, in an area undergoing rapid development. "It gives us the opportunity to be more experimental in our CBD to get better outcomes for the people using it," the chief executive of Liverpool City Council, Kiersten Fishburn, said. The street grid of downtown Liverpool was laid out in 1827 by Robert Hoddle, who would go on to survey and plot Melbourne's distinctive grid. And Liverpool is changing fast, with a proposed local environment plan to allow denser and residential development around the inner city, as well as the opening of University of Wollongong and Western Sydney University campuses.

There's more tha one Liverpool

[Anonymous Coward]

Originally thought it was the UK one, and got very confused until I saw the domain name and realised it was in AUS!

Captcha: specific

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[yobjob]

What threw me is they said "inner city". Liverpool in Sydney is out in the sticks! If that qualifies as inner city then may aswell proclaim Canberra as an outer suburb.

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[Green Mountain Bot]

My first reaction was, "Downtown Liverpool has a grid? And it wasn't laid out until 1827?" That it is Australia and not England clears both questions right up.

Right, for planning

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it is for planning purposes. Because you need hi-res cameras that track individual's movement for that. It isn't even a very good lie. Step up your game...

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[b0s0z0ku]

Who said anything about hi-res cameras? The cameras literally need only as good of a resolution as to count moving objects (people/vehicles). They did that for a while in NYC -- a contractor literally zip-tied cheap camera hardware to traffic light posts. Tiny lenses and they removed them after a week or so.

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[b0s0z0ku]

Nah, just put a AU$50/day congestion charge in the CBD or increase parking fees, so the amount of drivers is reduced enough so people can safely walk and cycle :)

Don’t worry

[93 Escort Wagon]

They promise the cameras won’t be used for anything else.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Big Brother is watching you

[swell]

No need for cameras. The same information should already be available from smartphone apps that are observing traffic patterns 24/7. This seems like another excuse to invade citizen privacy; to acquire specific information about each individual driver and pedestrian. Beijing leads the way in this intrusive technology.

My city police have mobile license plate cameras that record every license plate, whether parked or moving, as they patrol the streets. They've been doing that for a couple years now and they share that data with other organizations freely; there is no law to prevent sharing. We don't have quite so many cameras stationed on buildings and intersections as some other cities, but we're getting there...

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[b0s0z0ku]

Exactly. They used to use pneumatic axle counters -- every time a hose was compressed by a vehicle axle passing over, a mechanical counter would increment by 1.

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[coofercat]

Except that now they're uniquely identifying each vehicle and person, and clearly a number plate can be used to identify the driver(s) of the vehicles.

Where before they knew a car drove past, and then returned half an hour later. Now they know that you left work, drove to Love Lane, parked up on the left, walked a few doors up, went into number 57 for 25 minutes, came out and then drove to the registered address for your vehicle.

I think I preferred the old way of doing it, but if you prefer your every move

And When A Stray Cat Runs Across The CCTV

[dryriver]

The AI monitoring everything gets confused and recommends building more sidewalks on the rooftops of that section of the city...

Intelligence dyad

[fractional_other]

Constructive, invasive, what's the difference?