This article discusses how achieving the European Union’s (EU’s) new road safety target of reducing road traffic deaths by 50 per cent by 2020 depends on removing legal and institutional barriers to the deployment of new enforcement technologies. The senior Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Adviser to the Dutch National Police Agency, and a European-level spokesperson on road and traffic safety, points to the importance of, among other requirements, an effective EU wide type approval process for freshly emerging equipment. New technical opportunities are emerging on both sides of the Atlantic for applications, including the combined operation of for example speeding and red light running enforcement, and automating safety compliance. One proposal from the United States (US) envisages a “Holy Grail” of automatic enforcement from within vehicles; while, in Europe, the role of passive enforcement is gaining increasing emphasis. To take one area where relatively limited technical intervention could produce disproportionately beneficial results, enforcement of the use of seat belts and other restraint devices (such as children’s seats) currently relies on the use of physical and necessarily random observation by police officers. Yet buckled seat belts can be the single-most effective traffic safety device for preventing death and injury. Since seat belt use (or lack of it) is visible to the human eye, it is also capable of being detected automatically by means of digital imaging technology. The main requirements are sufficient color contrast with the seat itself, a shallow camera angle (of about 15° in relation to ground level) and allowance for different windshield constructions – with, preferably, an additional light source on the side of the vehicle. The article shows how a Finnish pilot in Europe has demonstrated the potential but further technical innovation is feasible. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting