Reason car with cameras does laps of Sydney suburb
A video of a car with cameras doing laps of a Sydney suburb has attracted attention online. For drivers not following the rules, it’s bad news.
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A video of an unmarked car with cameras on either side doing laps of a Sydney suburb has attracted attention online.
The video, taken in Wolli Creek, was posted to Reddit, with curious residents wondering whether cars with automatic number-plate recognition cameras had replaced traditional parking inspectors.
“Didn’t know this was a thing. Unmarked council vehicle with ANPR (surveillance) cameras doing laps of Wolli Creek looking for parking offenders,” the video was captioned.
“Cheaper than having street walkers do it and harder to abuse them,” one user pointed out.
“Man, parking rangers aren’t even getting exercise now,” someone joked.
“Kinda cool! In a dystopian, what have we come to, god help us all kind of way!” another said.
One person wrote: “God bless Bayside Council, to their credit they didn’t book people during the pandemic who couldn’t leave their home for work or isolation last year. Guess they need to recoup all that lost revenue by going from rangers marking tyres to number plate readers. Some may say it’s like going from a fishing rod to a deep sea trawler…”.
Some people shared experiences where they had briefly stopped illegally and then received a parking fine in the mail despite not seeing an inspector – and now assumed a car like the one in the video must have caught them.
Bayside Council confirmed to news.com.au that it uses cars with ANPR cameras daily, but has done so for a while.
“Bayside has been using this technology since December 2020, it is not new technology and is used across Australia for parking compliance,” a council spokeswoman said.
She said the technology had reduced administration time and now fines placed on vehicles could not be removed by others or affected by weather.
“It has also reduced physical and verbal abuse to our parking officers in these areas by 100 per cent,” she said.
The information captured by the technology is sent to Revenue NSW, which sends the fine to the owner of the vehicle.
Originally published as Reason car with cameras does laps of Sydney suburb
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