How North Yorkshire Police overcame backlog issues and set up a selffunding speed enforcement programme which helped reduce speed-related collisions by 59% over 12 months.
In early 2010, under the “95 Alive Strategic Road Safety Partnership” banner, North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC), City of York Council (NYC) and North Yorkshire Police (NYP) collaborated to assess the feasibility of Camera Enforcement in line with the Government Directive to reduce casualties.
Covering the area of 8,000m2 comprising of 28 identified collision sites with only one camera van during the trial proved to be logistically challenging and only allowed for the van to be deployed once a day. The pilot, which was originally planned for six months, was extended for the same period twice to allow for further assessment as to the impact on road traffic collisions at the test sites. The results after 18 months were impressive:
North Yorkshire Police captured more than 26,000 offences and reduced speed-related collisions at the test sites by up to 59%.
With still too many collisions happening in the area and following a business case submission NYP progressed to deploying three vans, twice a day, to increase the benefits in trying to reduce even further speed-related collisions. This potentially meant that NYP could capture up to six times the volume of offences that were captured during the pilot, which posed North Yorkshire Police with two main challenges:
The administration of the more than 26,000 offences from one van, which equates on average to 1,444 offences per month, proved very time consuming as the team had to manually fast forward to each offence on the film clip, grab the still image of the offence and validate the evidence.
July 2012 proved to be the busiest month during the pilot programme and saw North Yorkshire Police’s 5-people strong Central Ticket Office (CTO) processing more than 2,100 traffic violations. An analysis of the pilot recorded a 50% reduction in speed related fatal collisions during 2011 and a 59% reduction in speed related fatal and serious injury collisions across the first 12 months of the pilot programme. The longer the speed enforcement pilot ran the more the impact on road safety became apparent.
To read this Case Study on full, please view North Yorkshire Police Case Study
