Birmingham City Council has nine months to identify areas where new traffic CCTV cameras are needed to help fulfil its duty to keep traffic flowing, after councillors branded its systems ‘inadequate’.
The council’s transportation and street services scrutiny committee said last week that the 17 traffic CCTV cameras operated by the city’s urban traffic control centre were not sufficient to cover key junctions on 11 major radial routes.
The UTC centre was supposed to have access to images from some 400 other CCTV cameras used to detect crimes – but this never happened. .
Councillors have set a deadline of next January for cabinet member for transportation, Cllr Len Gregory, to identify priorities for new cameras and, by November, to find ways of using West Midlands Police or other existing CCTV cameras to monitor traffic. Cllr Alistair Dow, chair of the committee, said: ‘We have not only a popular mandate to do something, but with the Traffic Management Act, also a statutory one. There is inadequate equipment available to see problems building up.’ .
On a more positive note, the committee applauded a proposed £25M scheme to join the current UTC systems operated by the West Midlands local authorities which currently work in isolation with those of the police, Highways Agency, and public transport operators. .
The councillors also noted that ‘no detailed assessment has yet been made of the impact the significant infrastructure renewal entailed under the highways maintenance and management private-finance initiative will have on traffic’. But they were hopeful that a requirement for the PFI contractor to submit proposed road closures would minimise disruption to the council. .