Skip to main content

Germany to abolish emergency telephones on federal roads

The Björn Steiger Stiftung, a German foundation originally set up to improve the response time emergency services need to help injury victims, has announced that the emergency telephones on federal, state and county roads will be abolished in all federal states in Germany except Baden-Württemberg. The foundation attributed the decision to cost reasons but also pointed out that the emergency telephones were becoming more and more superfluous due to mobile location technology.
April 19, 2012 Read time: 1 min
RSSThe Björn Steiger Stiftung, a German foundation originally set up to improve the response time emergency services need to help injury victims, has announced that the emergency telephones on federal, state and county roads will be abolished in all federal states in Germany except Baden-Württemberg. The foundation attributed the decision to cost reasons but also pointed out that the emergency telephones were becoming more and more superfluous due to mobile location technology. However, around 16,000 emergency telephones on German motorways, which are run by the German insurance industry association GDV, will be kept.

Related Content

  • Troopers in the TOC – a recipe for success
    May 11, 2016
    A traffic incident management project in Arizona has speeded up reopening closed lanes and saved an estimated $165m through reducing traffic delays. The process for clearing roadway incidents on the Maricopa County freeways in Arizona has always reflected industry best practice with, for instance, a live feed of freeway cameras to the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) dispatch centre and the City of Phoenix Fire dispatch centre. The region has nearly 480km (300 miles) of freeway connecting 27 citi
  • New technology revolution in urban traffic control?
    January 26, 2012
    Urban traffic control is a well-defined and practised art. Nevertheless, there are technologies here and on the horizon with the potential to revolutionise how we do things. By Gavin Jackman and Andrew Kirkham, TRL, and Jason Barnes. Distributed monitoring and control of urban traffic networks and flows is nothing new. PC-based Urban Traffic Control (UTC) is now well established and operating in many locations around the world. However, it is worth considering the effects of the huge growth in the use of sm
  • Speed cameras make safety savings?
    April 18, 2012
    The use of speed cameras in urban areas is said to make major savings overall, according to a new study. A two year cost-benefit analysis published online in Injury Prevention shows that the deployment of speed cameras in urban areas saves vast amounts of money as well as lives.
  • German authorities use CB-radio message to reduce accidents in roadworks
    April 8, 2014
    Citizen Band radio is proving useful to prevent accidents in Germany’s roadworks. In common with other German Länder (federal regions) with large volumes of commercial vehicles using their trunk road networks, Bavaria had been experiencing high levels of road traffic accidents (RTAs) involving heavy trucks in the vicinity of minor motorway maintenance sites. This was despite the extensive visual warning regulations published in the German federal road safety audit (RSA) guidelines for the protection of site