From Monday, drivers holding a phone behind the wheel can be photographed by smart cameras. The Netherlands is the first country in Europe to use the cameras.
If the system registers that the driver is holding a phone, the photo is automatically forwarded to the Central Judicial Collection Agency. There, an extraordinary investigating officer will determine whether there is indeed a violation. In that case, the driver will be fined 240 euros.
The cameras take pictures of every passer-by. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the head of the driver is not in the picture, because photographs are taken diagonally downwards. The driver’s hands and license plate are. The cameras work day and night and in all weather conditions.
The photos can be requested by the license plate holder and an appeal can be lodged against the fine.
Distraction high risk
According to the Public Prosecution Service, this step is necessary because distraction behind the wheel increasingly plays a role in road accidents. “Just answering an app or looking up a phone number in the car, many drivers do that. But it poses a great risk to road safety.”
Holding mobile devices behind the wheel is not allowed. Nowadays, the police mainly act by stopping motorists, but that takes a lot of capacity. That is why the Public Prosecution Service started looking for possibilities for digital enforcement, with the cameras as a result. The cameras have been used successfully for some time in Australia, says the OM.
In the Netherlands, many violations were found during test periods: on one test day, two cameras registered 400 drivers holding a phone in their hand. It concerned a camera that hung along an N road for 24 hours and one that was placed above a highway for six hours.
The Public Prosecution Service is working on more innovations in the field of traffic enforcement. For example, this year experiments are being carried out with twenty new section control systems on provincial roads and a trial is being carried out with portable speed cameras in Rotterdam and Noord-Brabant.
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