Siemens snaps speeders

Speeders or people running red lights in the Austrian town of Mödling will get their tickets faster than before, because the city is introducing digital radar devices from Siemens. For the first time in Austria, pictures of traffic violators no longer have to be developed but are digitally transmitted to the traffic violation office.

Until recently, Mödling’s radar systems were equipped with rolls of film which had to be replaced, developed and manually processed. The new Siemens solution reduces the handling effort to a minimum, because pictures of speed violators, people going against traffic and red-light runners are now taken digitally and transmitted wirelessly to a data centre for further processing. Eleven old stationary sites and one radar site were equipped with the new systems. Three measurement cycles are currently performed in a rotation specified by the community.

Notifications of fines can now be mailed right away to the violators since the data is available centrally. The community also has instant online access to the data to check on its status or run reports.

The systems take two pictures of each vehicle caught by the radar. The stored images are regularly transmitted via UMTS to the Siemens Business Services data centre where specially developed software reads the vehicle’s license plates and passes the images on to the regional police headquarters, which is responsible for issuing the tickets and collecting the fines.