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London traffic lights rigged to win International Olympic Committee's favor
- tijs 15y agoMost, 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 15y agoNah, 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 15y agoIsn't the whole idea of having a super yacht to not have to sleep in somebody else's shabby hotel suites?
- SagelyGuru 15y agoOf 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?
- rkudeshi 15y agoJust 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.
- rsanchez1 15y agoI also find it creepy, but I wonder if the CCTV and traffic light network can be hacked to help you arrive somewhere on time, or even to have a rival arrive late to make them look bad.
- _delirium 15y agoVaguely, but it sounds like it was a fairly 'manual' sort of tracking: they attached GPS devices to the vehicles, so watching them on CCTV just meant switching to feeds based on the GPS location, rather than some kind of automated vehicle-following algorithm.
- mryan 15y agoThe UK has a scarily-advanced automatic number plate recognition system in place throughout many parts of the UK, particularly London and the south east. The police can, and do, track vehicles in real time using this system. This is particularly true in London, where this is used to enforce the congestion charge. Although the collection of the congestion charge is automated, this system can be used to alert police to the location of a vehicle in real time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK
- nknight 15y agoOf course it's creepy, but it's not new, either. The UK went Big Brother long before even 9/11, their CCTV obsession has been making international news since the 90s.
- nl 15y agoThat'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.
- dmfdmf 15y ago> 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 15y agoThe original estimate was a farce anyway. It could never have been delivered for that.
- gaius 15y agoI bet it could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Summer_Olympics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Summer_Olympics
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoMelbourne 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.
- estel 15y agoWhilst that was an original estimate several years before the bid formally took place, Parliament agreed to a budget of £5.3B for the games, an extra £2.7B contingency, "security and policing costs of £600 million, VAT of £800 million and elite sport and Paralympic funding of nearly £400 million" [0]. £2B for actually staging the games is covered by sponsorship etc. As the agreed cost before the bid was finalised, this is really rather close to the $18B figure the cited Parliamentary report comes up with. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Financing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Financing
- DanI-S 15y agoIt'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 15y agoSpot 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.
- DarkMeld 15y agoThat's totally awesome and completely fine in my book. Props (Cheers!) to whoever thought of the idea.
- benologist 15y agoSummary 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-olympic-committee-london-summer-olympics http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-olym...
- eps 15y agoOh, common now. Who is there left believing that an Olympic city selection process is based on city merits (and not on bribes and kickbacks)?
- sparknlaunch12 15y agoMissile 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 15y ago>Londoners hope the world will enjoy the games. As a Londoner, I hope the games suck and they never come back.
- SagelyGuru 15y agoThey 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.
- SagelyGuru 15y agoI 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.
- nkoren 15y agoI'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.
- TomGullen 15y agoI spoke in person to someone who operates traffic lights last year at a party, and he told me about this!
- alainbryden 15y agoI'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.
- malandrew 15y agoBeijing 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.