Don't ask me why, but one afternoon I had the desire to prototype a vehicle-mounted license plate scanner that would automatically notify you if a vehicle had been stolen or was unregistered. Understanding that these individual components existed, I wondered how difficult it would be to wire them together.
But it was after a bit of googling that I discovered Victoria Police had recently undergone a trial of a similar device, and the estimated cost of roll out was somewhere in the vicinity of $86,000,000. One astute commenter pointed out that the $86M cost to fit out 220 vehicles comes in at a rather thirsty $390,909 per vehicle.
Surely we can do a bit better than that.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9
http://www.openalpr.com/
It is interesting that we live in an age where anybody can tap into this data.
Good God! Now Little Brother is watching us too.
No problem. Just pull the battery out of your phone and ride a bike while wearing big, dark sunglasses.