THE CHALLENGE
The council wanted to upgrade its legacy network of CCTV cameras, both attended and unattended, to enforce a wide range of moving traffic contraventions including weight limits, bus lanes, banned turns, box junctions and school keep clears. It was important that the new system could consistently deliver cost savings and higher productivity throughout the period of a new five-year contract.
Another requirement was that the system could utilise LBBD’s existing community safety cameras and integrate with existing mobile enforcement vehicles from third party suppliers. This would enable the council to take a phased approach to migrating from existing assets that are nearing their end of life.
THE SOLUTION
After awarding the contract to Videalert for its hosted CCTV enforcement platform, Tina Brooks, Interim Head of Parking at LBBD, commented: “We are committed to achieving best value and Videalert is providing us with the latest high definition cameras that deliver significant cost savings and higher productivity whilst offering 99% uptime, a considerable improvement over our previous system. Based on open standards, the Videalert platform provides us with the flexibility to meet all present and future needs, enabling us to seamlessly upgrade to new cameras as they become available in the marketplace. The new system will help us meet our commitment to making our streets safer for road users and pedestrians alike.”
The new system comprises forty six ONVIF-compliant digital HD CCTV cameras from Videalert that operate in unattended mode and capture high quality images to minimise discard-rates, increase productivity and help reduce the number of appeals. The hosted platform allows LBBD to maintain a whitelist of exempt vehicles including buses, taxis and emergency vehicles to further improve efficiency. Importantly, Videalert ensured a phased transition in parallel with the introduction of a new Back Office Notice Processing system to ensure minimal downtime during the changeover process.
Captured evidence packs are stored on Videalert’s hosted digital video platform where they can be accessed and reviewed securely over the internet. Validated evidence packs are sent to the council’s back office system to issue penalty charge notices (PCN). Videalert’s flexible hosted platform makes it a quick and cost effective process to deploy enforcement as it does not require the installation of any IT at the council’s offices.
Multi-level, 24/7 monitoring also enables Videalert to optimise system health and achieve industry-leading availability rates in excess of 99%. The latest self-healing technologies automatically detect, diagnose and recover the majority of faults with all rebooting and recovery processes taking place without human intervention. Videalert’s hosted platform will also generate a wide range of reports in line with key service performance KPIs.
This contract is a continuation of a general trend whereby Videalert’s enhanced performance and functionality is causing local authorities to re-evaluate what represents best value. As a result, the company has been particularly successful in replacing an increasing number of legacy systems and enabling councils to extend enforcement to further improve compliance without incurring major additional capital expenditure.
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