Google Knows Everything, and Now so Does Every Finnish Traffic Enforcer

THEY WILL FIND YOU. AND, THEY WILL ISSUE YOU A TICKET.

If you ever find yourself in a parking area in Finland, and you don’t have enough money to cover the fee, don’t even think about running away from your ticket. Because traffic wardens in Finland will find you, and they will take you down – with their Google Glass.

Dubbed Google Glass for Traffic Warden, the project aims to equip Tampere traffic enforcers with Google Glass to enable them to check the parking information of hundredsof cars in just an hour.

“One example is that in an hour and a half it checks 600 cars, which is about a quarter of the time it took with the old equipment,” said Vincit’s head of product Essi Pihlajamäki.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Winner of the Demola Autumn Season 2014, the Google Glass for Traffic Warden was developed by a five-member student team under the guidance of its project partner, Vincit, Finland’s leading mobile application implementor.

According to Vincit’s Customer Relationship Manager Petri Suhonen, they didn’t wait for the City of Tampere to make the proposal. Instead, they let the students start the development process and offered it to the city for testing. “In that way we saw right away the benefits of this new service,” says Suhonen.

The Google Glasses will run on a software that automatically recognizes license plates of cars under the EasyPark system and shows whether their parking fee has already expired.

The service isn’t limited to parked cars. It can also be used by traffic wardens to make reports on other issues such as broken roads, traffic accidents, and graffiti with a photo attached to it.

Tampere is piloting this in early spring of 2015. Other cities from countries such as Australia and Sweden have also shown interest in the project.

This report prepared by Futurism.com