Southampton City Council in the UK is introducing a cloud-based CCTV enforcement system for bus lanes in key areas of the city, in an effort to reduce congestion, improve traffic flow and provide a more reliable public transport network.
Due to go ‘live’ on June 20, the new fixed bus lane cameras will feed data to Videalert’s Department for Transport (DfT) Manufacturer Certified hosted system. The company is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of traffic enforcement and management systems. Videalert provides an intelligent digital video platform for delivering civil traffic enforcement, traffic management, and improved community safety applications from the same infrastructure. The future-proofed system combines sophisticated video analytics with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) and offers a full range of deployment options, including wired LAN, WiFi LAN, 3G/4G WAN, mobile, attended and unattended, as well as supporting all analog and ONVIF compliant digital megapixel cameras.
Videalert’s hosted platform is unique, as it does not require any hardware or software to be installed on customer premises, and allows the rapid introduction of unattended traffic enforcement services. Under the new contract, Southampton will deploy cameras and processing units at locations where there are high levels of driver non-compliance of bus lane regulations. Evidence packs will be automatically retrieved via a cellular 3G/4G connection for access and review by trained council operators, prior to sending confirmed offences to the back-office processing system for the issuance of penalty charge notices. Videalert is providing Southampton with a dedicated virtual server to guarantee the highest level of security and integrity, with cloud storage used for backup.
The Videalert system has been procured through Balfour Beatty Living Places (BBLP), which has a 10-year contract to manage all highway infrastructure assets on behalf of Southampton City Council. “This is our first experience of working with Videalert, and we have been impressed with the speed with which the solution can be deployed,” commented Brian Hammersley, contract manager at BBLP. “In our role as highways contractor for Southampton, we also liked the ability of the Videalert platform to support other potential CCTV activities that the council may consider using in the future.”
According to Paul Walker, travel and transport manager at Southampton City Council, “This project will enable us to reduce the incidence of vehicles misusing bus lanes. Automating the enforcement of these contraventions will improve driver compliance, allow our public transport services to achieve faster, more reliable journey times, and improve access to services for vulnerable road users.”
Tim Daniels, sales and marketing director of Videalert, said, “This innovative hosted enforcement solution allows councils to respond faster to operational and strategic requests for deployments over both the short and long term. It also provides councils with greater flexibility and future investment protection, by simultaneously supporting multiple civil traffic enforcement, traffic management and community safety applications from the same infrastructure.”
