Last month, Maruti Suzuki and Delhi Traffic Police jointly announced the introduction of Automated Traffic Violation Detection (ATVD) systems in Delhi. Specifically, on a 14km stretch of road which links Dhaula Kuan and Sarai Kale Khan. If you’re a Delhiite, you must have guessed it by now that the stretch of tarmac is actually one of the busiest in the national capital and is part of the inner ring road.

Well, a fortnight has passed since the announcement and it seems the installed technology is doing pretty well. In 15 days, over 22,000 automated challans have been issued to motorists. If you think that’s a big number, consider this – according to Delhi traffic police, between 7 and 8 lakh vehicles use the abovementioned stretch of road daily. In 2018, approximately 30 per cent of the total number of challans for violation of traffic rules were issued on the same length of the road.

Based on the numbers given above, don’t think that the technology is overworked and cannot cope with the kind of traffic that flows through that stretch. The cameras are intelligent and capable enough to capture movements of multiple vehicles simultaneously. Once an office is captured, a software kicks in and develops a clear image of the vehicle’s license plate. The challan is sent through SMS to the vehicle owner and he/she has to visit Delhi traffic police’s headquarters at Todapur to pay the fine.

Currently, the traffic police have access to a database of only 29 lakh car owners out of the 1.08 crore vehicles registered in Delhi. The traffic police have approached the transport department to update the database with phone numbers of the owners to more effectively utilise the installed technology. This was a pilot project but the same standard of ATVD systems will be installed across the capital in times to come.

Source: ETAuto