Science & Tech · Big Tech & Internet · 5 hrs ago
Singapore team built tool to turn red-light cameras into speed enforcers
In January 2024, as road deaths and accidents were rising, Singapore’s traffic police needed a way to use red-light cameras to catch speeding drivers.
A four-person government team built Roadbuster in three months to help solve the problem while a permanent system was still being developed.
The cameras could capture speeding, but the police’s older system could not process those images in bulk as speeding cases.
Roadbuster turned camera images into cases by extracting details such as vehicle registration numbers, speeds and locations, helping officers send offence letters more efficiently.
Speeding violations fell 66 per cent at locations where the tool was activated, according to an Open Government Products director, though the number of accidents it prevented is unknown.
The tool processed 120,000 speeding cases before the traffic police upgraded their own systems to handle the work.
Roadbuster is now being retired, with the police’s upgraded systems taking over.
A four-member team at Singapore’s Open Government Products built Roadbuster in three months to process speeding offences captured by red-light cameras.
The tool let traffic police turn camera images and data into cases that could be processed and logged.
The Open Government Products director said speeding violations fell by 66 per cent at locations where Roadbuster was activated.
Roadbuster processed 120,000 speeding cases before traffic police upgraded their systems and the tool was retired.
The Singapore Police Force said the system helped officers process cases more efficiently and spend more time on other operational work.
- Who
- A four-member team at Open Government Products, including senior product manager Darren Lau, built Roadbuster for Singapore’s traffic police.
- What
- Roadbuster enabled speeding violations captured by red-light cameras to be processed and logged as cases.
- When
- The team built it in three months, starting in January 2024.
- Where
- Singapore.
- Why
- Traffic police needed a way to process speeding cases from red-light cameras while a permanent vendor solution had no clear completion date.
This story does not have two clearly opposing sides.
With road accidents and fatalities rising, traffic police were looking for ways to use more cameras to catch speeding vehicles.
The four-member Open Government Products team had built Roadbuster and rolled it out, fine-tuning it along the way.
Traffic police had upgraded their systems to handle the capability, and Roadbuster was being retired.
- Team size
- Four people
- Build time
- Three months
- Speeding violations
- Fell by 66 per cent at locations where Roadbuster was activated
- Cases processed
- 120,000
- Tool
- Roadbuster
1 source
What people are saying
What people might not know is that red-light cameras also inherently have a speeding enforcement functionality, but this couldn't be operationalised by traffic police because the legacy system was really old, and their vendor couldn't enhance the system to be able to process speeding cases on red-light cameras
We’re sure this is not a coincidence because the trend follows for cameras we turned on later
This has enabled officers to process cases more efficiently and devote more time to other operational work