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Helping free the injured and clearing up accidents is only half the problem of car crashes on our motorways — the police and traffic officers also have to catalogue the scene to work out what happened and who’s going to pay for the mess. New 3D laser scanners should hopefully cut motorway closure times by capturing the scene in minutes, speeding up the laborious process dramatically.
The Department for Transport has awarded £2.7m worth of funding to cover part of the cost of rolling out the new scanners to 27 police forces across England. Hampshire and Thames Valley rozzers will be the first to implement the scanners, which will capture a 3D representation of the carnage for analysis back at base. Mike Penning, roads minister said:
“The £2.7m DfT funding award will see 3D laser scanners rolled out quickly where they are needed most. This will benefit drivers by reducing incident clear up times by 39 minutes on average.”
Travelling by road is one of the most dangerous forms of transport, and we have a lot of crashes in the UK. Hopefully this’ll see the motorways cleared and opened quicker without impacting rescue operations. [The Guardian]
Image credit: Car crash from Shutterstock
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Wasn’t this the same story from July? GizUS
Genius idea – it seems to me the UK Police are well ahead of any other Police force in the world.
ANPR
DNA testing
This thing
Those sirens that make it easier to determine which direction they are coming from
Good memory! And yes, no matter how much the UK policeforce gets bashed in the media, it’s worth remembering that we really are leading the pack in many areas.
They’ve been using these things for a while, just in very small numbers. Sounds like this is a wider role-out of the same tech.
They should have bought them a load of Kinects and then spent some on R&D to develop the software. After that was sorted it could roll them out to the entire force for a comparative pittance.