| You're not thinking like a bureaucracy. Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the various localities. The localities are all storing the data. Then there is a central system that can query all the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the data. The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit. The report isn't automatically generated if the average speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report is requested by the department issuing speeding citations rather than the one (if any) investigating data irregularities. Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH. You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but that's a possible speed, because the automated report didn't include the impossible speeds. There may have also been sightings that would have implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own reports that don't already exist. You could request the raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then you have to make a thousand requests to each individual locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a location that would have produced an impossibly high speed. |
The problem with that is that isn't how average speed cameras work, and where speeds are ludicrously high then there is a human operator looking at it.