Road-rule enforcement camera

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(Redirected from Speed camera)

Image:Redlightcamera.jpg

A road rule enforcement camera is a system including a camera and a vehicle-monitoring device used to detect and identify vehicles disobeying a speed limit or other road rule. Common examples include the following:

  • Speed cameras (included in the term "safety camera" in the UK) for identifying vehicles travelling over the legal speed limit.
  • Red light cameras (included in the term "safety camera" in the UK) for identifying vehicles proceeding through red lights.
  • Bus lane cameras for identifying vehicles traveling in lanes reserved for buses and/or vehicles engaged in car pooling.
  • Toll-booth cameras for identifying vehicles proceeding through a toll booth without the toll being paid.
  • Level crossing cameras for identifying vehicles crossing railways at grade illegally.
  • In central London, cameras help to identify drivers who evade paying the congestion charge.

There are systems that are combinations of the above - for example, some systems detect both red-light infringements and speed infringements.

Contents

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History

Image:Gatso Camera.jpg

Dutch company Gatsometer BV, founded by the 1950s rally driver Maurice Gatsonides, invented the first road-rule enforcement cameras. Gatsonides wished to better monitor his speed around the corners of a race track and came up with the device in order to improve his time around the circuit [1]. The company developed the first radar for use with road traffic, and is the world's largest supplier of speed camera systems. Because of this, in some countries speed cameras are sometimes referred to as "Gatsos". They are also sometimes referred to as "photo radar", even though many of them do not use radar.

The first systems introduced in the late 1960s used film cameras to take their pictures. From the late 1990s, digital cameras began to be introduced. Digital cameras can be fitted with a modem or other electronic interface to transfer images to a central processing location automatically, so they have advantages over film cameras in speed of issuing fines, and operational monitoring. However, film-based systems still generally provide superior image quality in the variety of lighting conditions encountered on roads, and in some jurisdictions are required by the courts due to the ease with which digital images may be modified. New film-based systems are still being sold.

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Technology

Vehicle-detection systems used in conjunction with road-rule enforcement cameras include the following:

  • Piezo-electric strips - pressure-sensitive strips embedded in the roadway (a set distance apart if speed is to be measured - typically 1-3 metres).
  • Doppler radar - a radio signal is directed at the vehicles and the change in frequency of the returned signal indicates the presence of a moving vehicle and the vehicle's speed.
  • Loops - inductive loops embedded in the roadway detect the presence of vehicles, and with two loops a set distance apart vehicle speed can be measured.
  • Laser - the time of flight of laser pulses is used to make a series of measurements of vehicle position, and from the series of measurements vehicle speed can be calculated.
  • Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems that use a form of optical character recognition to read the vehicle's licence or registration plate.

Systems can be car or van-mounted, hand held, or in a fixed site. In car-mounted systems, cameras and radars or lasers are fixed to a car. When deployed, the car is parked beside a road, and any speeding vehicles driving past are photographed. Most red-light cameras, and many speed cameras, are fixed-site systems, mounted in boxes on poles beside the road. They are also often attached to existing gantries that hold up signs over the road, or to overpasses or bridges.

Speed camera systems that measure the time taken by a vehicle to travel between two fairly distant sites (from several hundred metres to several hundred kilometres apart) are also being developed and introduced. From the elapsed time over the known distance, a speed infringement can be detected, or in the case of truck drivers driving long distances, avoidance of legally prescribed driver rest periods can be detected. Such systems take a picture of every vehicle passing the first site, and every vehicle passing the second, then find matches between the images from the two sites. Most commonly, this matching is done by using ANPR systems.

In the United Kingdom, ANPR average-speed camera systems are known as SVDD (Speed Violation Detection Deterrent) by the Home Office. More commonly, they are known by the public by their brand name - SPECS (Speed Enforcement Camera System [2]), a product of Speed Check Services Ltd. They are frequently deployed at temporary roadworks sites on motorways, but also increasingly on known accident blackspots such as the A77 between Ayr and Girvan in Scotland. A SPECS system also enforces a 20 mph speed limit over Tower Bridge in central London to reduce vehicle damage to the bridge.

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Verification and system testing

In the UK, every speed camera must be calibrated and certified before the images from it are acceptable to the court, including the cameras used in police vehicles. Several speeding prosecutions have failed in the UK due to out of date calibration certificates.

The pictures taken by road-rule enforcement cameras must usually be viewed by a person before any infringement notice or ticket is issued to the driver, and judged to be satisfactory or not. This step is known as verification, and is a standard legal requirement in nearly all jurisdictions. Verifiers typically must check some or all of the following:

  • that there is no sign of interference with the vehicle detector by objects other than the alleged speeding vehicle,
  • that the licence plate is unambiguously readable according to a legal standard,
  • that the make and model of vehicle matches that recorded by the licensing authority for the number plate,

and in some jurisdictions

  • that the appearance of the driver in the images is adequate in some way - for example, that it matches the picture on the driving licence of the vehicle's registered owner.

In most jurisdictions, verification is carried out by the police force, although in many places it is carried out by private companies on a fixed-price basis under close police supervision. Generally, cameras must undergo approval testing and operational testing to ensure that they function adequately. In the US, it is common for all installation, operation, and verification procedures to be carried out by private companies that receive payment based on the number of infringements they issue, and often under no testing regime whatsoever.

Depending on the number of things that need to be identified in the images and the quality of the camera equipment, somewhere between 35% and 80% of infringements result in a notice being issued to the owner of the vehicle. A legal requirement for driver identification reduces the prosecuting rate dramatically.

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Issues

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Political Issues

The use of road rule enforcement cameras is certainly contentious. There are a number of legal issues which arise as a result depending on local laws and the procedures used by the enforcing bodies. There are political issues associated with camera schemes which are often unpopular with motorists and in many areas motorists have lobbied against camera schemes. Finally, there are concerns as to whether road rule enforcement cameras genuinely do improve safety.

Image:Scarborough red light camera.jpg In a number of jurisdictions, there was a degree of controversy surrounding the deployment of increasing numbers of speed and red-light cameras beginning in the late 1980s. Police and government were accused of "Big Brother tactics" in over-monitoring of public roads, and of "revenue raising" in applying cameras in ways to increase government revenue rather than improve road safety.

Often when camera deployment has been accompanied by large scale advertising campaigns explaining the justification and planned effects of such cameras, proponents argue that the public has accepted their use on a large scale. In other places, public responses have included spectacular vandalism of camera systems including attacks with explosives, tractors, cutting equipment, incendiary devices, rifles, and even attacks on camera operators, as forms of civil disobedience and protest.

In the US, camera enforcement has been controversial since the first speed camera system issued a ticket in Friendswood, Texas in 1986 and La Marque, Texas in 1987. Neither program lasted more than a few months before public pressure forced the systems to be dropped. Three times in the US cameras have been rejected after public votes. In Peoria, Arizona voters were the first to reject cameras by a 2-1 margin in 1991 followed by a similar vote in Batavia, Illinois in 1992. Anchorage, Alaska rejected cameras in a 1997 referendum. In Virginia legislature declined to reauthorize its camera enforcement law, and all red light cameras in the state were deactivated on July 1, 2005 after a study showed they were ineffective in reducing accidents. In 2002 the state of Hawaii, USA, experimented with photo radar vans but they were withdrawn months later due to public outcry.

In the province of Ontario, Canada, Mike Harris was among the first to make photo radar a substantial election issue. He abolished the program after being chosen as premier in 1995.

In the UK speed cameras became a contentious political issue after the Department for Transport introduced Safety Camera Partnerships. This lead to the installation of a large number of cameras and enforced that camera revenues were used only for the installation and maintenance of cameras and the staff associated with this [3]. In 2004, the Conservative Party accused the government of "waging a war on drivers" and announced that, if it came to power, it would review the effectiveness of all cameras in England and Wales, scrapping those which were ineffective.

In the Albertan capital of Edmonton in February 2006, a scandal erupted when it was revealed that two police officers accepted bribes from private contractors who received lucrative contracts to provide photo radar in Edmonton. The officers and contractor involved now face criminal charges that remain before the courts. [4]

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Legal Issues

Various legal issues arise from such cameras and the laws involved in how cameras can be placed and what evidence is necessary to prosecute a driver varies considerably in different legal systems. In some areas the cameras themselves have been ruled illegal.

A common issue is proving who was driving the vehicle at the time the offence occurred. Pictures from the San Diego red light camera systems were ruled inadmissible as court evidence in September 2001(USA Today article, Judge's ruling). The judge said that the evidence from the cameras was "so untrustworthy and unreliable that it should not be admitted".

Another common issue is a challenges to the accuracy of the cameras. Cameras which give false positive results can cause legal issues. For example, a speed camera which reports the wrong speed may result in an attempted prosecution of a driver who was not speeding.

Some legal issues arise from the use of digital images instead of film, with claims that digital images could be created artficially. In August 2005, in Sydney, Australia a speed camera photograph was challenged on the basis that an MD5 signature was insufficient to protect the photograph from tampering. Magistrate Lawrence Lawson demanded that the Roads and Traffic Authority produce an expert witness who could prove the photographs were tamper-proof and the RTA was unable to provide such evidence. The defendant was found innocent and awarded court costs.

In some jurisdictions (California, for example) the law says that the camera needs to obtain a photo of the driver's face, of sufficient quality to convince the judge that he is convicting the actual driver, not someone else who had access to the vehicle. Some US cities send registered owners a document that looks like a real camera ticket in an effort to get the owner to identify the driver responsible for the offence. [5].

Some US states that formerly allowed only red-light enforcement cameras (but not photo radar speed enforcement cameras), have now approved, or are considering, pilot programs for speed enforcement. Maryland approved such a program in January 2006. As of March 2006, the California legislature was considering a pilot program for the City of Beverly Hills.

The UK operates a similar system, where the owners of vehicles photographed on camera are contacted with a 'Notice of Intended Prosecution' (NIP) requiring them to provide the name and address of the driver. Several drivers are challenging this under the Human Rights Act 1998 on the grounds that this amounted to a 'compulsory confession' under the European Convention of Human Rights they could not be required to give evidence against themselves, that the police in obtaining this confession are not acting in accordance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) and that since the camera partnerships that include the police, local authorities, Magistrates Courts Service (MCS) and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are not independant, having a joint financial interest in the fine revenue and therefore defendants do not get a fair trial. Although their plea was initially granted by a judge, it was later overturned and is considered serious enough breech on human rights by the human rights campaign group Liberty[6] that this matter is to be heard in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and the European Courts of Justice (ECJ). Also there are questions as to whether or not government is contravening their citizen's rights under the Bill of Rights 1686 and the Magna Carta the founding principles of UK's democratic constitution.

In some provinces of Canada such as Alberta, the issue of driver identification is avoided by not issuing demerit points for photo radar infractions. Here, the registered owner of the vehicle is expected to pay the fine - if (s)he was not driving it then the onus is on him/her to collect the money from the offender. However, the resulting lack of long-term reprecussions for repeated photo radar offences has been criticized by some as giving a "licence to speed" to those who can more easily afford speeding fines.

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Issues of effectiveness

Studies commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) in the UK have provided analysis of the effects of speed cameras. An initial three-year study [7] showed that vehicle speeds dropped by seven percent at sites where cameras were installed and claimed that "at camera sites, there was also a reduction of over 100 fatalities per annum (40% fewer). There were 870 fewer people killed or seriously injured and 4,030 fewer personal injury collisions per annum. There was a clear correlation between reductions in speed and reductions in PICs" (personal injury collisions). The followup four-year study [8] concluded "after allowing for the long-term trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean) there was a 22% reduction in personal injury collisions (PICs) at sites after cameras were introduced. Overall 42% fewer people were killed or seriously injured. At camera sites, there was also a reduction of over 100 fatalities per annum (32% fewer). There were 1,745 fewer people killed or seriously injured and 4,230 fewer personal injury collisions per annum in 2004."

There is some plausable suggestion however that the reduction in injuries and fatalities can be easily explained through regression to the mean (RTM) error, since through DfT camera placement guidlines cameras are installed at sites where several accidents have already occurred, irrespective of accident causation, and that through RTTM even if no camera were placed at the site accidents would naturally be reduced. In addition, the DfT four year report only includes statistical modelling of the RTM effect based on a reduced set of camera sites for which suitable data was available (see [9] appendix H --- tables H3 and H7). Rural roads were excluded from the RTM modelling, because of difficulties establishing representative models for such roads, although the report does state it is likely that RTM effects will be larger for rural roads because expected collision frequencies tend to be lower than on urban roads. The report urges caution in drawing too strong conclusions from a small data set. Based on the RTM modelling undertaken the report suggests that for personal injury collisions (non-serious collisions resulting in injuries) a 16.2% reduction in injuries was due to the cameras, a 6.7% reduction was due to regression to the mean and a 7.9% reduction was due to the general downward trend in accidents over the period. For fatal and serious collisions, the modelling estimated a 10.4% reduction in such collisions due to the cameras, a 34.8% reduction due to regression to the mean and a 9.3% reduction due to general downward trends in accident rates.

Professor Mervyn Stone of the The Department of Statistical Science at University College London was commissioned by the BBC Radio Four Today Programme to write a report <ref name="Rep245">{{Techrep reference 

 | First=Mervyn
 | Last=Stone
 | Title=Adjudication of the Radio 4 Today Programme Speed Tribunal
 | Number=245
 | Institution=UCL
 | URL = http://www.ucl.ac.uk/stats/research/Resrprts/abs04.html#245
 | Year=2004

}}</ref> about UK speed cameras and also Traffic Calming. His report criticises some of the methodologies used in some speed camera studies and in particular he mentions the RTM effect. Some of these criticisms are addresssed by the four year DfT study previously mentioned.

A UK based controlled study <ref>Are mobile speed cameras effective? A controlled before and after study by S M Christie, R A Lyons, F D Dunstan and S J Jones in Injury Prevention, vol 9 pages 302-306 (2003)</ref> showed that speed cameras are effective at reducing accidents and injuries but added that wider deployment would improve their effectiveness.

A US Safety Evaluation of Red-Light Cameras found that red light cameras led to an increase in the number of rear-end collisions. There was still however a modest overall cost benefit from the reduced number and severity of right angle collisions.

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Counter technology

Methods used to avoid detection by cameras include:

  • Obeying the speed limit.
  • Braking before the camera.
  • Units which detect when the vehicle's speed is being monitored and warn the driver (these may be illegal in some areas).
  • Units which use a Global Positioning System and a database of known camera locations to warn the driver when a camera is nearby. This method relies on a good database of camera positions.
  • Obscuring the vehicle licence plate. This may be illegal if the plate cannot be read by other drivers. Treatments which claim to obscure the plates from cameras but leave them visible to other drivers are often considered to be of dubious efficacy.


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See also

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References

<references/>

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External links

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Example images

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For enforcement cameras

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Against enforcement cameras

nl:Gatsometer sv:Trafiksäkerhetskamera

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