Specialist contractor Carnell has said that its SafetyCam has now reported over 700 vehicle incursions on the strategic network, underlining a growing issue in the industry and leading to 61 convictions.
Over the last three years, SafetyCam has been deployed on over 600 schemes and in every Highways England area. The road worker safety vehicle, can be used in a number of different ways to improve driver behaviour, and when looking in detail at road worker abuse and incursions into traffic management.
Since October 2017, approximately 6000 incursions into road works have been reported in Airsweb.
Acknowledging the scale of the problem is an important step in educating drivers of the dangers the country’s workforce face and allows the sector to engineer safer working environments. SafetyCam however enables dangerous occurrences to be captured and quickly provides prosecution-ready evidence, so that traffic management regulations and the laws of the road can be enforced effectively.
Working with the client to agree on the best course of action has led to Carnell’s engagement with nine police forces across the country. From this, 61 convictions have been secured, with another 350 awaiting a result. The remainder are judged to have been unintentional, with no action necessary.
With police resources stretched, it is necessary to tailor the approach to each forces requirements to ensure a minimal amount of administration on their part. Therefore, it is imperative that the evidence is robust, as well as GDPR compliant, so that a notice of intended prosecution or warning letter can be issued at the police’s discretion, changing the behaviour of those that put our colleagues at risk.
Carnell is a supporter of the Stamp it Out campaign which has an aim of increasing the proportion of road worker abuse and incursions being reported and ultimately the elimination of these incidents, improving the safety and wellbeing of road workers.
SafetyCam has also had success in making the roads safer in the following ways:
- Routinely used to report on speeding site vehicles.
- Dramatically reducing numbers of HGVs ignoring diversion routes and using local roads.
- Enforcing weight limits on motorway bridges.
- Reducing drivers jumping red-lights at road works.
