Bristol City Council has awarded Videalert a contract to deploy its Digital Video Platform to monitor key routes and provide journey time information to tackle congestion across the city.
The Videalert system went live in March and is delivering real-time VRM data to Bristol’s central Urban Traffic Management Control system for traffic modelling and journey time details, as well as to Avon and Somerset Police for crime prevention and investigations.
The data collected and analysed by the system is providing “intelligence” to optimise the design of transport schemes in central Bristol. It also contributes to the Safer Bristol Partnership’s project, which includes installation of an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras around the city to tackle crime. Avon and Somerset Police and the Safer Bristol Partnership have each contributed £50,000.
Duncan Laird, Group Manager – Transportation at Bristol City Council, says: “We wanted to engage a single supplier to implement a back-office hardware and software solution that would give us the flexibility to support multiple traffic management applications and disseminate information to the council, Avon and Somerset Police and other stake-holders. The Videalert platform is highly scalable, supports our existing analogue cameras and allows us to progressively migrate to a mixed analogue/digital camera environment.”
David Richmond, CEO of Videalert, added: “We are delighted to have been awarded this high profile project, which extends our proven capabilities in the civil enforcement area to other traffic management and police VRM surveillance applications. With the ever increasing pressure on funding, we anticipate that partnership initiatives of this kind will become more common, maximising the effectiveness of CCTV infrastructure to reduce costs and make our cities safer places to live and work.”
Videalert says that its Digital Video Platform uses standard off-the-shelf equipment and integrates with Bristol’s existing cameras and infrastructure. It will deliver cost savings to the council by enabling a range of additional traffic management and civil enforcement applications to be deployed, without having to procure multiple legacy point products. The system can let the council enforce moving traffic offences such as bus lanes, banned turns and box junctions.
Duncan Laird added: “The new system is far more than just another ANPR system and provides us with a cost-effective and reliable way of detecting incidents and relaying the information to the city’s Traffic Control Centre as well as quantifying the value of highway improvements and testing new traffic schemes. The availability of real-time data will enable accurate journey time information to be posted on the Travel West website, helping drivers to avoid areas of congestion. It will also deliver real-time VRM data to the police’s BOFII database, potentially reducing crime.”
The Videalert system integrates with existing roadside cameras and communications infrastructure which transmits analogue video to the council’s CCTV control room over the B-Net optical fibre network. In the first phase of the project, the software has been deployed at 15 sites across the city connecting some 65 ANPR and Context View cameras. It is expected that coverage will be further extended. Visit www.videalert.com.
