London has congestion charging; that means if you drive a car into certain areas of London during a work day you must pay 8 Pounds. To catch scofflaws they have these unbelievable camera set ups on streets near entrances to the pricing zone. This is a picture of what they look like.
Very Police-stateish, right? So on the one hand you have every planners dream - a way to charge autos for using relatively scarce city street space. On the other hand, if you want to effectively charge folks you need to track their movements, which results in these rather scary camera pods looming around certain street. You can help but think of the movie Blade Runner when you see these things. It doesn't help that it was particularly grey the day I photographed it, further enhancing the Blade Runner effect.
Of course, you can opt out of the whole tracking-of-your-movement thing by walking but there are still cameras watching your every move.
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