Extra camera vans for county’s roads in bid to reduce fatalities
POLICE ARE set to deploy six new safety camera vans in North Yorkshire in a bid to reduce speeding motorists on the county’s roads.
The smaller vans are more suited for hard-to-reach locations in the 5,000 miles of road which criss-cross the countryside, including the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors.
With state-of-the art camera equipment, the vans can not only detect speeding drivers, but can also identify anti-social driving such as seat belt offences and drivers using mobile phones.
The vehicles are also equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology, which helps detect cross-border crime.
North Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Julia Mulligan, said: “The most important thing to me is that they can be much more responsive to local communities and can easily be deployed to where there are 30mph and 40mph limits.
“I get lots of correspondence from people, particularly in rural areas, complaining that speeding and anti-social behaviour on the roads is a real problem.”
North Yorkshire Police does not use any fixed site cameras, instead preferring the flexibility of its mobile vans. These new additions bring the total fleet to 12.
Over the past three years, Newcastle University has studied the county’s statistics for people killed or seriously injured across 22 local sites and evaluated the effect of the safety camera vans.
Chief Constable Dave Jones said: “Once a speed camera is fixed, motorists get wise to its whereabouts and only change their behaviour 15 seconds before and 10 seconds after driving past.
“With the study conducted by Newcastle University finding a reduction of eight casualties as a direct result of the current vehicles, the extension of the fleet is a positive step towards preventing tragedies on our roads.”
Ms Mulligan added: “This is genuinely about keeping people safe. It’s a really good way of improving people’s safety, responding to the needs of local communities and saving people’s lives.”