Leeds City Council is expanding the reach of its CCTV traffic enforcement to a further six sites. The council will now be enforcing bus lane contraventions at 30 sites around the city.
A Videalert system was installed in 2011 to monitor bus lane offences in five city centre sites where is has helped reduce contraventions by more than 90 per cent. Leeds has added to the locations monitored and the system is now considered to be an integral component of the council’s strategy to keep city traffic moving.
Councillor Richard Lewis, executive board member for regeneration, transport and planning at Leeds City Council, said: “In order to ensure quick movement of public transport, we need to make sure other vehicles obey the rules of the road. The Videalert system has proved to be extremely flexible. It is a vital part of our strategy to speed traffic flows, improve timetable efficiency and reduce bus journey times to encourage more people to use public transport and make the city a better place to live and work.”
The system is based on Videalert’s Digital Video Platform, described as a multipoint solution that uses standard off-the-shelf equipment and integrates with analogue and ONVIF compliant digital megapixel cameras and infrastructure. This combines ANPR with video analytics to provide enforcement of moving traffic offences such as bus lanes. It will also enable the council to run civil traffic management and enforcement applications at the same time including, if needed, vehicle plate read data to police ANPR databases (BOFII) and traffic management systems (UTMC).
According to Tim Daniels, Sales and Marketing Director of Videalert: “Leeds City Council has proved that installing the latest digital systems can make a major impact on reducing moving traffic contraventions and reducing congestion on the roads. The Videalert platform also provides Leeds with a future proofed solution so, if and when legislation is enacted to allow councils outside London to extend enforcement activities to other moving traffic offences such as banned turns, box junctions and restricted access areas, the same system can deliver these requirements out of the box. This eliminates the need to procure multiple point solutions thereby substantially reducing costs over the lifetime of the contract.”
The system expansion is part of a new five year maintenance contract recently awarded to Imperial Civil Enforcement Solutions, a provider of business processing and IT solutions to councils.
