Skip to main content

Bristol brings together support services to form major emergency control centre

A new multi-purpose centre has opened in Bristol to house the council’s Emergency Control Centre, Traffic Control Centre and Community Safety (CCTV) Control Rooms into a single facility for major emergencies. These teams provide public safety services that use 700 CCTV cameras around the city with a large part of the centre dedicated to managing the city’s traffic network and monitoring the flow of traffic around Bristol.
October 20, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
A new multi-purpose centre has opened in Bristol to house the council’s Emergency Control Centre, Traffic Control Centre and Community Safety (CCTV) Control Rooms into a single facility for major emergencies. These teams provide public safety services that use 700 CCTV cameras around the city with a large part of the centre dedicated to managing the city’s traffic network and monitoring its flow of traffic.

Staff from transport providers are now able to work with the council’s traffic management team to provide greater reliability in public transport services and more accurate real-time information about services.  

The centre monitors 200 junctions, manages almost 40 traffic and information signs, handles 46,500 welfare and telecare calls every month and has been built on a communication platform that links into the city’s high-speed fibre network.

Open 24 hours a day and 365 days a year; the centre provides traffic monitoring, set up and review of traffic signals, emergency response to telecare and assistive technology users, alarm and security monitoring, lone worker support and CCTV management.

Marvin Rees, mayor of Bristol, said: “This new centre represents an investment in the safety of citizens and getting the city moving. The challenges we face to beat congestion, support vulnerable people in their homes and secure safer streets require new approaches and new ways of working. By blending state of the art technology and a collaborative approach to sharing operations we’re taking a positive step towards meeting these challenges.”

Related Content

  • Passport roundtable examines London’s kerb space priorities
    March 19, 2019
    UK congestion is getting worse, in part due to the influx of deliveries coming into cities. At a roundtable discussion in London, software provider Passport examined new ways in which local authorities can work together to better manage the kerb. Ben Spencer listens in Competition for kerb space is one of the major conundrums of modern urban mobility. Some authorities are being creative about it, but good practice is not widespread. “There are individual pockets of good work going on with cities who a
  • Glasgow wins future cities grant
    January 25, 2013
    The city of Glasgow has won a Future Cities Demonstrator grant from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), a body set up by the UK government in 2007 to stimulate technology-enabled innovation. The grant, worth US$37.8 million, is intended to make Glasgow one of the UK's first smart cities; the money will be used on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. Plans include better services for citizens, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on tim
  • Virtual sessions provide benefit for attendees
    December 7, 2021
    It can rightly be said that this ITS America Annual Meeting is an event that will keep on benefitting attendees. For instance, there is a whole raft of virtual sessions that attendees here in Charlotte can access
  • IBM and City of Lyon collaborate to create transport management centre of the future
    November 15, 2012
    IBM researchers are piloting a system with the City of Lyon, France which will be used to help traffic operators in its transportation management centre to evaluate an incident and make more informed assessments about which actions would restore traffic flow. Using real-time traffic data, the new analytics and optimisation technology can help officials predict outcomes and analyse ways to resolve problems. The researchers say that, although traffic management centres have sophisticated video walls and colou