Nottingham City Council was one of the first local authorities to install and operate fully digital bus lane enforcement in 2007. The council says it’s helped reduce bus and tram lane contraventions.
However, it wasn’t until recent installation of the LaneWatch unattended enforcement cameras and the deployment of an enforcement vehicle, pictured, that road safety risks could be tackled. The council and Nottingham Express Transit, the operators of the city’s tram network have long been concerned about the amount of vehicular traffic using various tram gates as a short cut especially around Nottingham Trent University, as used by thousands of students and shoppers. How to cut the vehicles using the tram gate, while keeping a speedy service? Using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, digital video recording, Zenco mobile capture software, wireless data transfer interfaces and RAID1 data storage, once video evidence is received in the Traffic Control Room it can be turned into a Penalty Charge Notice and a fine issued.
Four months into its tour of duty the new mobile enforcement vehicle, based on a standard Toyota iQ, is already proving its worth according to Caroline Stylianou, Nottingham’s service manager for traffic and safety. She says: “It’s a totally different way of working. We have the freedom to deploy wherever we’ve got hotspots, which is so useful”.
With the new mobile enforcement vehicle, Stylianou says there was an immediate change in driver attitudes. She added: “This is what we want ultimately. We don’t want to be picking people up for offences in bus lanes – we want a clear, safe route for buses to get through”.
Stylianou has also found other benefits to using the car, such as traffic network management. She says that some of Nottingham’s major junctions, for various reasons, are not covered by cameras, and so cannot be monitored from the traffic management control room. With the new vehicle, however, pictures from sites that have proved difficult to capture on CCTV can be taken and beamed back live to the traffic management team.
Since the installation and trial of cameras, the system has been extended to other parts of the city and after its success, plans are now being drawn up to further extend their reach in the near future.
