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

  • Internet-connected cars their functionality and safety challenges
    February 27, 2013
    Internet-connected cars are poised to flood the market in the near future. Pete Goldin considers the functionality they offer, the technology they use and the challenge they represent in terms of driver safety. Many vehicles on the road today offer some sort of inter­net connectivity and experts agree that this capability will become a competi­tive differentiator in the automotive industry in the next few years. The era of the digital vehicle, it seems, has started. “We clearly see that cars in the near f
  • Redflex enforces commitment to ethics
    May 29, 2013
    Redflex has introduced stringent ethical and procedural requirements following an investigation into corruption in Chicago. Like the Phoenix, which also happens to be the name of the company’s home city, Redflex Traffic Systems has been reborn. Following a headline-making public relations debacle late last year, Redflex has reinvented itself, establishing a series of stringent policies and procedures to ensure ethical business conduct, while continuing to deliver the traffic safety technology and services t
  • The effectiveness of roads policing
    March 6, 2015
    The Joint Roads Policing Unit of Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary in the UK commissioned the Transport Research laboratory (TRL) to evaluate the effectiveness of their roads policing strategy in terms of reducing the number of people killed and seriously injured in road collisions. The focus was on the fatal four causes of collisions: speeding, drink-driving, not wearing a seat belt and drivers using mobile phones. TRL carried out a detailed literature review, in-depth review and analysis of
  • Average speed cameras reduce injury collisions, says report
    October 31, 2016
    Research carried out into average speed camera (ASC) effectiveness by the UK’s RAC Foundation concludes that the implementation of ASCs in the locations that have been assessed in its report has had the effect of reducing injury collisions, and especially those of a higher severity. Even taking into account other influencing factors, the report says the reductions are large and statistically significant. Researchers analysed detailed accident data taken from 25 sites where average speed cameras were inst