
London traffic lights rigged to win International Olympic Committee's favor - ValentineC
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/13/3018101/london-traffic-lights-rigged-to-win-international-olympic-committees
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rkudeshi
Just me or is it a bit creepy that not only do they have a city-wide CCTV
system, but they apparently used it to track specific vehicles?

Perhaps it's just the US mentality of tremendous respect for civil
liberties[1], but what they did is actually appalling to me.

[1]: Please, let's not make this a discussion of how civil liberties aren't
uniformly enforced in the US. I think we can agree that things like the Bill
of Rights affirm more individual liberties in the US than many other
countries.

~~~
sneak
The reason I moved out of NYC (and out of the country) was because the NYPD
put up cameras on my local (135th Street 1/2/3) subway entrance.

If you think the billions of USD of antiterrorism money is somehow not funding
purchase of facial recognition software, you're foolin' yourself.

Collect enough uniquely-identified John Does and you can link them
statistically to MetroCard swipes, and then you've got names from the credit
cards used to purchase them...

Ride the subway enough times with (a) friend(s), and then they've got part of
your social graph, too.

~~~
felipemnoa
Anecdotally speaking, I know people in NYC that live in communities with high
crime rates that are happy knowing that their neighborhood is being monitored
by the police 24/7. Whether in the long term this is actually a good or a bad
thing to have cameras in the streets, I just don't know.

Devil's advocate here, there are countries that have had no such instant
surveillance and still managed to oppress their people quite effectively. I
don't want to start a flame war so I won't name a country. And many times all
it took for you to get arrested was for somebody to accuse you that you were a
traitor or that you were badmouthing the government.

~~~
sneak
If the cameras did what they're supposed to do, by putting them up, they'd no
longer be high crime rate communities.

Were it that cameras reduced crime, we could have a reasonable and rational
discussion about where the "privacy/security" lever could be set.

Unfortunately, they don't.

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nkoren
I'm a transport planner who lives in London. An elder statesman amongst local
transport planners once told me the following story.

"Once there was a sheik that was planning to make a £3B investment in a new
real estate development in Canary Wharf [located about 5 miles east of the
city centre]. Plans had been drawn up, and everything was in place and ready
to go -- with one hitch: the sheik wanted to see the site for himself.
Wouldn't sign the on the dotted line until he'd walked around and kicked its
metaphorical tyres a bit.

"The problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik you you have to stay in a a
certain class of hotel, and there just wasn't anything appropriate in Canary
Wharf. So he found a nice place in the West End [about 3 miles west of the
city centre]. He flew in, spent the night there, and went to see the site
first thing in the morning, around rush hour.

"The other problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik, you don't just hop on
the tube with everybody else. So, he hired a limousine and said 'take me to
Canary Wharf!'.

"Two hours later, the limousine was still crawling past the Tower of London
[about 1 mile east of the city centre]. They'd managed an average speed of 2
miles per hour. The sheik was fuming. Any property _this_ hard to access
surely had to be worthless. 'Driver!' he said, 'Change of plans. Take me to
Heathrow.'

"And that's how 3 billion pounds of investment died in traffic."

You can bet that the London team pitching to the IOC were very well aware of
this story.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Wouldn't you just helicopter him there?

~~~
nkoren
Helicopters aren't used for VIPs here, no.

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DanI-S
It's an altogether unpleasant feeling to see my country and its people become
a plaything for the rich and powerful.

Too many government decisions are made in order to procure glory and
gratification for those at the helm. Britain has a lot to offer the world, and
it has been stifled by its vain and inward-looking leadership for far too
long.

~~~
gouranga
Spot on.

To be honest 99% of us ignore it and treat it like a different world. However,
if it becomes a problem en masse the shit WILL hit the fan and the accountable
will be made examples of.

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dmfdmf
> the event's costs have expanded from an original estimate of $3.9 billion to
> $18 billion, according to Vanity Fair.

This was the most shocking item in that report. That blows away my usual
"double the estimates" rule-of-thumb for govt related bids. Now we even have
rule-of-thumb inflation.

~~~
46Bit
The original estimate was a farce anyway. It could never have been delivered
for that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth games cost a whopping $1.5billion AUD (about £600
million GBP; about 3% of the current estimate for the 2012 Olympics).

Now the Delhi 2010 games did go vastly overbudget, possibly as high as 60,000
crore INR (about £7 billion; less than half the current estimate for the
Olympics). But they also built a 4 lane highway, new metro tunnels, and
expanded the airport in that price. About one-quarter of that gross estimate
was budget spent on the sporting events and directly related infrastructure.

There are 302 events at the 2012 Olympics versus 272 at the 2010 Commonwealth
games.

They're not exactly doing it on the cheap.

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benologist
Summary stuffed full of verge links and seo tags just like the site they left
to "avoid" the "AOL Way".

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-
olym...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-olympic-
committee-london-summer-olympics)

------
nl
That's news? I know Sydney did the same thing back in the 90's. They didn't
have as sophisticated a system - I think it involved people phoning in
locations of the delegate's convoy as it drove around.

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tijs
Most, probably all, modern olympic game organizers make sure there are VIP
lanes for sponsors and the very (very) rich. Basically, fortune permitting,
you have to be able to get off your yacht, stroll into your limo and then be
at any olympic venue in about 10 minutes.

So while it could also be done to impress committee members it's more probable
that it's done to not piss off the Mittal's and the Saudi's.

~~~
SagelyGuru
Nah, you fly from your yacht to your Olympic Suite in a helicopter. This was
done to favour the next rank down, i.e. government officials who have to be a
little circumspect about their priviledges but not circumspect enough to allow
their subjects to go about town unhindered.

~~~
tijs
Isn't the whole idea of having a super yacht to not have to sleep in somebody
else's shabby hotel suites?

~~~
SagelyGuru
Of course, I meant your entertainment suite at the stadium. Somewhere to relax
with your friends from the government while you watch the games. Perhaps share
a few laughs over a glass or two about how they conned the Olympic Committee?

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sparknlaunch12
Missile launchers, dedicated traffic lanes for Olympic delegates, controlled
traffic lights... it doesn't sound like a Bourne film... it is a Bourne film!
You have to pay £10 to enter the park and £15 to climb the Orbit tower.

The Games will be sadly for corporates and VIPs. Any non athletes or local
Londoners will suffer during this Olympic period. Londoners hope the world
will enjoy the games.

~~~
Produce
>Londoners hope the world will enjoy the games.

As a Londoner, I hope the games suck and they never come back.

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eps
Oh, common now. Who is there left believing that an Olympic city selection
process is based on city merits (and not on bribes and kickbacks)?

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SagelyGuru
I have no idea how one gets to be on the Olympic Committee but intelligence
and thoroughness are presumably not required. They could have hired a car and
gone on a drive by themselves.

On second thoughts, nowadays they would have been no doubt identified through
their payment and the lights surreptitiously switched to green anyway.

Whatever happened to the Olympic spirit of fair competition?

No doubt this exploit had convinced the government more than ever about the
value of mandatory online identification, mandatory financial transactions
monitoring, car registrations tracking on the streets, and control of traffic
on the Queen's highways in favour of the VIPs.

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SagelyGuru
They plagiarised the idea from the KGB, whereby in Moscow they had/have middle
lanes reserved for the VIPs and the peasants are consigned to where they
belong: to crowded muddy ditches.

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malandrew
Beijing went as far as to paint the leaves on trees green to win IOC's favor.

For those that haven't been there, it is (or at least was) a dismally grey
city with little greenery outside the public parks). I know they've worked to
improve this issue, but at the time of the IOC visitations it was quite
dreary.

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alainbryden
I'm looking forward to these Olympics - I've got lots of money on some high-
paying odds. I have it on very good authority that everyone in the stadium
will spontaneously vanish during the opening ceremony.

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TomGullen
I spoke in person to someone who operates traffic lights last year at a party,
and he told me about this!

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DarkMeld
That's totally awesome and completely fine in my book. Props (Cheers!) to
whoever thought of the idea.

