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Glitch hits drivers with false speeding fines

Victoria Police has shut down point-to-point speed monitoring cameras on the Hume Highway today after it was discovered on Friday that the cameras had been slugging non-offenders with fines over a four-year period.
Written by Luke Hopewell, Contributor

update Victoria Police has shut down point-to-point speed monitoring cameras on the Hume Highway today after it was discovered on Friday that the cameras had been slugging non-offenders with fines over a four-year period.

Surveillance camera

(Traffic cameras image by FaceMePLS, CC2.0)

Victoria Police said in a statement today that the fault related to an out-of-sync clock on one of the five cameras which led to nine drivers being issued incorrect fines.

The Victorian Department of Justice has reviewed all camera logs to identify any other inconsistencies, while the point-to-point cameras have been temporarily suspended on the Hume Highway.

Point-to-point cameras work by taking a photograph of a vehicle as it passes the camera and calculating the time it takes for that vehicle to pass by the next camera on the highway.

Traffic camera management company Redflex intends to rectify the issue in the coming days.

"The fault is limited to the point-to-point average speed system and in no way affects the operation of other Redflex speed and red-light camera systems in service around the world," the company said in a statement responding to requests for comment.

Redflex has also apologised to the citizens of Victoria who have been affected by the fault.

Ken Lay, Victoria's deputy commissioner of roads policing, said that the faults were disappointing.

"I will not be reinstating them until I am personally convinced that the fault has been 100 per cent eradicated and that measures have been put in place to ensure that this can never happen again," he said.

"Statistically, these faults have been extremely rare — nine out of approximately 68,000 penalties issued since January 2008. But that is nine too many. People must have confidence in the road safety camera system. We cannot afford for that confidence to be eroded by errors such as these," Lay added.

The fault was detected after a fined driver protested the penalty, leading to further investigation of the point-to-point cameras.

Victoria Police intends to maintain a strong presence on the Hume Highway while the cameras are offline.

Updated at 5:39pm, 18 October 2010: Redflex has issued a statement in which it reveals that the nine incidents occurred over the past four years as opposed to the two-year period that Victoria Police had given.

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