News Update - Thursday, October 16, 2008

Speed guns will watch you at night
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

In an attempt to make the city's roads safe at night, the Delhi traffic police is procuring upgraded speed guns that can detect the speed of a vehicle even after dark and also take photographs as evidence. Unlike the present radar guns being used by the cops, the new ones are fitted with cameras with a strong flash that is effective even on very dark stretches.

The new devices, which will hit the roads in a couple of months. The guns have a wide vision — they can automatically detect violators within a range of five lanes. There is very little human interference. The speed guns being used now by the traffic police can detect a vehicle's speed only when these are pointed towards it.

In the new system, the data about the vehicles can be transmitted to a laptop at a backup station within a one-km radius through a wireless system.

The traffic police have already initiated the procurement process. "We are going to get 15 speed guns to start with which should be in use by the end of this financial year. More such guns will be procured in phases after that so that our existing speed guns can be upgraded for better enforcement," said S N Shrivastava, joint commissioner of police (traffic). Each unit will cost Rs 15-20 lakh.

At present, the traffic police has 11 mounted speed guns which are fixed onto interceptors or poles. All of these are attached to cameras which click photographs of the vehicles breaking rules. But none of the cameras is flash-enabled. In addition, there are another 100 portable speed guns which detect the speed of only the vehicle they are pointed at. These are not fitted with cameras.

Since the new system is completely automated and the records of all the vehicles are created instantly and sent to a backup device, this is expected to check corruption. There won’t be scope for ‘negotiations’. Though these speed guns may have come as a boon for enforcement agencies, elsewhere a debate has been raging on the accuracy of the devices. In developed countries, it has been observed that speed guns do not always give accurate results though the traffic police swear by their accuracy.