Google to unleash ‘super-powered’ traffic wardens which could bring motoring misery to millions
Tech giant reveals plans to create 'city of the future' where no-one can escape fines and tickets
Google is working on a parking system which will use artificial intelligence to help ruthless traffic wardens heap even more misery on motorists.
The tech giant is reportedly working to design a hyper-connected city of the future in which drivers are hit with heavy fines as soon as they step out of line.
It wants to persuade American towns and cities to use a system called "Flow" to manage public transport and parking.
This cloud-based software features an “optimised parking enforcement" facility which will make sure traffic wardens follow routes which let clobber the maximum number of motorists and earn a medium-sized city an extra $4million (£3million) every year.
Google is currently trying to persuade Columbus, Ohio, to install Flow and claimed this will grant it "new superpowers to extend access and mobility".
This allowed The Guardian to obtain documents which set out the search engine's fiendish plans.
“When governments and technologists collaborate, there is an enormous potential to reimagine the way we approach urban mobility,” .
Sidewalk is reportedly planning to use camera-equipped motors like the Google Street View cars to zoom around cities and count all the empty parking spaces.
This information would be compared against data from parking meters to direct motorists to a free parking bay.
“Only Google or Apple are in a position to track parking occupancy this way, without expensive sensors on poles or embedded in the tarmac,” added Alexei Pozdnoukhov, director of the Smart Cities Research Center which is based at the University of California.
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Google's plans could also bring about the end of the bus pass, as it wants to give poor or elderly people vouchers for taxi services like Uber so they can share cars rather than catch buses.
Columbus has not yet agreed to Google's plans, which would effectively let the tech giant and its allies dominate yet another industry, potentially starve traditional public transport suppliers of cash and hit motorists with even more parking fines.
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