How a four-member government team turned red-light cameras into speed enforcers in 3 months

“These are things that we wouldn’t have known because for us, the faster I can do this (task), the better it is for traffic police. You can log more cases and I don’t really care if people are penalised wrongly. They could just submit an appeal and try to handle the process that way as well,” said Mr Lau.

To avoid penalising people who did not speed or were misidentified by image recognition, the team had a police officer review each image before an offence was recorded.

Case volume rose after Roadbuster began operating, said Mr Lau. The time officers took to process a case fell from 10 minutes to three, freeing them to handle more cases or other enforcement work, he added.

When the data was consolidated and confirmed, the scale surprised the team.

“When we looked back as we handed over the project and decommissioned it, the numbers were quite staggering, because we didn’t know it would be this number of cases when we first started out,” he said.

SAME SCREEN, NEW SYSTEM

OGP did not hand Roadbuster over to the traffic police. Instead, the new traffic police system adopted the interface the team had developed, said Mr Lau.

“At the end of the day, traffic police still funded the vendor to build an integrated system directly tying the red-light cameras to the case lodging system,” he said.

“So in terms of handover, we didn’t specifically hand over Roadbuster … we maintained a similar user interface between Roadbuster and the new system that was being developed.”

Because the design stayed consistent, officers needed no downtime for training, he said.

“Roadbuster was influenced by the legacy system as well, so we kind of tried to carry the consistent design language across all systems,” said Mr Lau.

On the 120,000 cases Roadbuster logged, he said handling public data safely was an utmost priority.

“Apart from passing it back to traffic police, we also store a copy of that data securely, so that if they need to reference it in the future, we are able to re-access that data and pass it back to them,” he said.

Mr Lau sees Roadbuster as an example of what OGP does best.

“We go in, we find where the biggest bottleneck is, and try to land impact with as limited resources as we can,” he said.