Behind the wheel of a 20-tonne lorry hurtling down the motorway, a driver is fiddling with his mobile phone in one hand and steering the HGV with the other. Spread out across the dashboard are five more smartphones plugged into the charging port.
Along the same stretch of road, a man is seen typing on his phone with both hands as his passenger steers the car. A man at the wheel of a white van speeds along with a small child perched between the driver and passenger seats — neither is wearing a seatbelt.
On any other day, these drivers might have got away with their dangerous behaviour, but they were caught by new artificial intelligence-powered traffic cameras that alert the police to irresponsible motorists.
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All of the pictures were taken in Devon and Cornwall, where the local force is in its third year of a trial of devices made by Acusensus, an Australian company. The six cameras use AI to scan the inside of any vehicle that goes past.
Nineteen regions across the country have tested the cameras, including Greater Manchester, Staffordshire and Sussex. Geoff Collins, the UK manager at Acusensus, said that interest in the trial had grown and more forces were expected to take part.
The reviews have been enthusiastic. Adam Pipe, head of roads policing in Essex, called the collaboration “phenomenal’. In Manchester, the trial caught more than 3,000 offences in only five weeks.
Last month, the first results from the Devon and Cornwall trial were published. In 2023, 83 people per day on average were caught driving without a seatbelt. This year, the number dropped to 14. There were, on average, 50 instances of people texting behind the wheel per day in 2023; that has dropped to ten this year.
Adrian Leisk, the head of road safety at Devon and Cornwall police, said: “This is the kind of behaviour change we couldn’t achieve with conventional policing methods. My colleagues see so many road traffic fatalities where the driver would have survived if they were wearing a seatbelt, so we are delighted this is making a difference.”
Stationed on a moveable crane-like structure, each Acusensus rig has two cameras, one with a steep view to peer into cars from above and another with a shallow view to spot drivers on the phone.
Every car that goes past the infrared cameras is scanned with AI technology. If nothing is amiss the picture is instantly and permanently deleted, but if a potential traffic violation is flagged the images are sent for three stages of human verification.
The first two stages involve checks by contractors at the security company Aecom, and any identifiable features such as the number plate, make of car or location are removed. If both find separately that the individual in the images is breaking the law, the full and uncropped image is sent to the local police.
Once the police have validated the offence, motorists are instructed to take a driver awareness course or, on subsequent violations, fined and given points on their licence.
Leisk said that if anyone was caught with an unrestrained child in their car, police officers also made a welfare check at the driver’s home.
Collins said the public feedback had been very positive. “People do not like other people peering at their phone when they’re driving along at 70 miles per hour.”
The cost of one of these camera rigs has not been disclosed, but forces are reported to have paid for the kit themselves. “It’s a polluter pays system,” Collins explained. Devon and Cornwall police will reserve a portion of the cost of the driving awareness course, though any fines go directly to HM Treasury.
A driving awareness course in Devon and Cornwall costs between £50 and £100. A fine for using a mobile phone can be as much as £200 and six penalty points, and a fine for not wearing a seatbelt is up to £500.
Designed by the businessmen Alexander Jannink and Ravin Mirchandani, the cameras have been in use since 2018. In New South Wales, one of the first Australian territories to use them, the number of road fatalities has decreased by 24 per cent. They are also used in the United States and Canada.
Jannink said he was driven to invention after a close friend was killed while riding a bike in Los Angeles, California. “It was down to the driver driving under the influence and allegedly using a mobile phone,” Jannink told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
Leisk said the police had even been experimenting with the cameras to catch drink and drug drivers. “Around Christmas last year, we deployed two trailers on a specific route with a lot of bends in it to capture what normal driving behaviour looked like,” he said. “Once we had that baseline, the AI looked for outliers. Then across two Friday nights we set them up again with a live feed going to police officers stationed further down the road.” They caught four drunk drivers by using the cameras in this way, he said.
Ultimately, Leisk said, the cameras were about saving lives. “Having a couple of officers out there issuing tickets isn’t going to change behaviour because it hasn’t changed it already,” he said. “That’s why we decided to try this tech and do things a little bit differently and who knows how many people’s lives were saved as a result.”
