One of the UK’s leading providers of video-based intelligent traffic enforcement and management systems, Videalert, is now the single platform standard for all CCTV traffic enforcement throughout the City of Westminster in London.
Westminster City Council has standardized on Videalert’s hosted CCTV traffic enforcement platform, with the decision taken after conducting a 12-month pilot comparison exercise between Videalert and the incumbent provider. Videalert and public services provider NSL, which are both part of the Marston Holdings group, were selected to deliver this solution after completing a comprehensive analysis across a wide range of enforcement activities including yellow box junctions, banned turns, and restricted access. The latest Videalert ONVIF-compliant digital HD cameras are now used at these locations to capture high quality images that minimize discard-rates, increase productivity, and help reduce the number of appeals.
The Videalert cameras are also playing a key role in helping to deliver Westminster City Council’s joint strategy with Transport for London (TfL), which aims to improve public spaces by reducing traffic congestion and tackling poor air quality. The council hopes to extend the use of the Videalert platform to additional locations including the Oxford Street West scheme and a number of traffic exclusion zones around schools in Westminster.
“The decision to extend the Videalert platform was taken after a number of successful deployments across the West End with high volume traffic and complex moving traffic scenarios. Videalert delivered the highest capture rates enabling us to meet our compliance objectives, a significantly higher level of performance compared with the previous manually-operated system, as well as providing the highest availability,” commented Darren Montague, business implementation manager in Westminster City Council’s Parking Services team. “The platform also delivers better value as future-proofing is built-in and additional camera assets and enforcement applications can be cost effectively added as required.”
Videalert’s sales and marketing director, Tim Daniels, added, “Our joint service proposition demonstrates how close collaboration between the public and private sector can deliver better outcomes. Improving traffic flows will help to reduce congestion and the corresponding air pollution whilst increasing road safety for the Westminster area. It also shows how councils can extend enforcement to further improve compliance without incurring major additional capital expenditure.”
Elsewhere in the UK capital, the London Borough of Bromley has extended the use of Videalert’s school safety system by adding five more camera locations that have been experiencing high levels of inconsiderate behavior from parents parking on the yellow ‘keep clears’ when dropping off or collecting their children. The system combines automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) with video analytics to deliver the highest productivity at the lowest operational cost. A single PTZ camera, continuously monitors the ‘keep clear’ zones and automatically captures only the drivers that are stationary in defined ‘watch areas’ and exceed the ‘watch times’. Evidence packs are automatically created for review by a qualified operator before sending them to back-office PCN (penalty charge notice) processing systems.
