Engineering solutions company Fima has finished a project on installation of the largest yet network of speed meters in Lithuania, with funding from the Lithuanian Road Administration under the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Now Lithuanian national roads have 139 stationary and 11 mobile speedometers to track the offenders.

“Every year around 300 people die and some 2,500 get injured because of drivers speeding. Obviously, one cannot expect to force people to abide by the speed limits only by preaching. We hope that speed meters built on dangerous road sections will help reducing the number of accidents in the years to come,” Deputy Director of the Road Safety Department of the Lithuanian Road Administration Povilas Narbutas has said.

In his words, speed meters are an excellent means of prevention – when they spot one, drivers slow down and it is often all that it takes to avoid a grievous misfortune. Of course, the meters also serve well to trace malignant speeders.

Rokas Šlekys, the Director of the Solutions Department of the intelligent engineering solutions company Fima, which has deployed a network of 150 speed meters in Lithuania has said that the German MultaRadar devices that have been set up on key national roads produce pictures of speed offenders of exceptional quality. “The stationary speedometers with digital cameras that we installed simultaneously record the time, the speed, the direction and the class of every passing vehicle. The picture clearly shows the face of the driver, the overall view of the vehicle and its licence plate, which is automatically entered into the violation file,” Fima’s representative has said.

In Šlekys’s words, other technical parameters of MultaRadar devices are equally important: the equipment operates at temperatures of -32 to +50 degrees Celsius. The speed measuring tolerance at a speed of 100 km per hour is up to 3 per cent.

All of the speed meters also come equipped with an electronic security system that responds to attempts to vandalise the equipment or to access its insides without permission. The electronic system transmits its signal instantly to the Public Police Security Service, which then arrives on the scene promptly.

Apart from the 139 stationary speedometers, there are another 11 mobile speedometers that Fima has installed in unmarked police patrol vehicles to keep track of speed limit offenders.

Recorded data from the meters are automatically transmitted to the data processing centre on Giraitės Street in Vilnius or to respective centres at regional traffic police departments. Fima has equipped the observation centres with 20 computer workstations.

At the initiative of the Ministry of Transport and Communications and the Lithuanian Police, several speed meters had been installed before this project was brought to life. There are a total of 151 stationary devices and 12 mobile speedometers mounted on patrol cars to monitor the speed of moving vehicles.

By the way, up to 10 per cent of speed meters will be relocated every year. Devices shall be removed from locations where the accident rate can be brought down with other instruments, like reconstruction of cross-sections, making the street wider, placing speed bumps, installing traffic lights, and so on. Such speed meters will be moved to new locations identified as hazardous in terms of accident rate and hence requiring immediate preventative measures.