Skip to main content

UK council to upgrade speed cameras

Derbyshire County Council is to upgrade speed cameras across the county to accommodate digital technology, at a cost of US$1.6 million. The council’s seventy speed cameras currently use wet film technology. It is believed that only twelve of these actually have film in them and that they are changed on a rolling basis. The new digital network will see all seventy sites being brought into operation at once.
September 23, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
Derbyshire County Council is to upgrade speed cameras across the county to accommodate digital technology, at a cost of US$1.6 million.

The council’s seventy speed cameras currently use wet film technology.  It is believed that only twelve of these actually have film in them and that they are changed on a rolling basis. The new digital network will see all seventy sites being brought into operation at once.

A spokesman for Derbyshire road safety partnership said: “We keep a close eye on the areas where people are getting killed or hurt and we move those cameras to the sites where they are needed most at any particular time.

“We’ve decided to make the switch because we hope it will allow us to make savings in the long term. “As more areas make the switch, it’s going to get harder and more expensive to get replacement parts and servicing for those with film-based systems.”

The spokesman added: “The digital system means that staff who view the photo evidence to decide whether or not a penalty notice should be issued will be able to download images from a camera while still in their office instead of travelling to the site to collect film for processing as they do currently.”

Speed cameras have been in operation across Derbyshire since 1994. Since then the number of people killed or seriously injured has fallen by 40 per cent on routes where cameras are in use.

Related Content

  • Is machine vision the future of enforcement?
    January 25, 2012
    Leading automated enforcement system suppliers talk about how they see machine vision technology affecting the sector in the coming years
  • The twisting path to enforcement’s future
    June 5, 2014
    Survey reveals some division of views about enforcement’s future as Colin Sowman discovers. Technological advances and legislative changes pose many questions for those involved in road enforcement, ranging from the changing demands of privacy and data protection legislation to the practicalities on multi-speed enforcement. So to get the industry’s views ITS International took soundings on some of these bigger questions. In a world where many vehicles are fitted with GPS linked ‘black box’ telematics system
  • Future of US cooperative infrastructure networks
    July 31, 2012
    Peter H. Appel, the new Administrator of the USDOT's Research and Innovative Technology Administration, on his vision of the US's future cooperative infrastructure networks. Peter H. Appel comes to the post of Administrator of the US Department of Transportation's Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) from a background in transportation-related work which stretches back over 20 years. Most recently with management consultancy A. T. Kearney, Inc., where he focused on busin
  • When speed compliance becomes a safety issue
    March 29, 2017
    David Crawford finds that softly, softly can be safely, safely when it comes to speed enforcement. Comedians and controversial TV presenters have long made jokes about having to watch the speedometer so closely as they pass speed camera after speed camera that they mow down bus queues. But the joke may have some factual basis according to a study by researchers from the University of Western Australia.