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Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss Federal Road Office (Fedro) is proposing a series of steps to cut down the number of accidents each year. More than 20,000 accidents on Swiss roads cause almost 400 deaths every year and many more serious injuries.

Government’s safer roads proposals consultation ends in March

The package of proposals, called Via Sicura , is winding its way through the mandatory Swiss political consultation process. The 60-odd proposals include improving road infrastructure, changing laws and toughening procedures. Among measures being considered:

• Eliminating dangerous stretches of road, and requiring mandatory road safety audits for new roads
• Banning commercial text message warnings of road checks ahead
• Limiting the validity of the driver’s license till the driver reaches aged 50, then it will be renewed for 10 years after an eye test
• Impounding the owner’s car in the case of serious accidents
• Introducing procedural changes like a mandatory breath-alyzer test in some situations.

Some proposals eliminated from road safety package

The plan to increase the cost of drivers’ third party insurance (responsabilité civile) and to use traffic fines to finance the Via sicura measures has been rejected. Other measures did not meet approval either: a mandatory one-day drivers’ education refresher course every 10 years, lowering the blood alcohol level limit for commercial truck drivers, and setting up special traffic courts.

METAS adds new tools to guarantee high-quality road speed measurements

There's a radar not far from here: Vaud, Switzerland

The government’s legal plans are backed up by hard data, specifically by the use of high technology to keep car drivers within the law. Most of the country’s road accidents are tied to excess speed, so the government’s Federal Office of Metrology (Metas) must ensure that the speed detection equipment deployed by the police, along the side of the road, to catch offenders is reliable. In other countries offenders have successfully argued in court that the equipment used was not up to technical standards or was not carefully maintained and as a result the data was unreliable. This could not happen in Switzerland, according to Metas.

Metas promises that its equipment provides consistently reliable readings that will stand up in a court of law. The federal office carefully tests new equipment under different conditions and calibrates it. The measuring equipment must be able to pick out an offending driver’s vehicle even in heavy, constantly moving traffic.

Bad news for speeders

Swiss law requires that the car’s speed be linked to a photograph of its licence plate, along with the date, time and location of the offense. This information has to be gathered so that the offense can be positively tied to a driver, not just to the vehicle.

Radars on the side of the road, fixed or otherwise, calculate the difference in the frequencies of the emitted beam and its reflection off a speeding car, using  the Doppler effect.

New methods include laser scanning

Newer methods of speed detection include the use of laser beams. Here the equipment sends a first beam of infrared light out towards the moving car, and measures the distance between the transmitter and the vehicle. It repeats this a second time, and then calculates the cars’ speed based on the time difference between the two separate distance measurements. In practice, the laser sends out continuous beams to eliminate measurement errors.

Increasingly the authorities are resorting to intelligent laser sensors at intersections that can scan a 40-metre road section for speeding offenders and drivers who run red lights.

Selective speed checks using radars on motorways, for example, are on the way out. The tendency is to deploy fixed cameras that capture and identify each vehicle entering a stretch of highway. At the end of the stretch, an identical structure of cameras and lasers identify the cars again. Computers will calculate the average time spent on the road between the two points, and send off tickets to drivers over the speed limit.

Links to other sites: Swiss statistics office, METAS (for guided tours), METAS Traffic Measurement Technology