Bermuda demonstrates world's first electronic vehicle registration system
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| Published on Friday, February 8, 2008 |
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ALBUQUERQUE, USA: Bermuda’s Transport Control Department (TCD), a department within Bermuda’s Ministry of Tourism and Transport, demonstrates system performance of an electronic vehicle registration (EVR) system designed to automate compliance monitoring and enforcement.
Initial deployment began in July of 2007 and more than 65 percent of Bermuda’s vehicle population has been tagged and the process is expected to be completed by June 2008, which will enable formal system operations to commence.
“The program has met the first phase of our deployment schedule and performed extremely well during the recent systems acceptance testing for end-to-end integration,” said Randy Rochester, Director of Bermuda’s Transport Control Department. “This is a critical achievement and demonstrates the fundamental strength of the system.”
The EVR system will automate enforcement of Bermuda’s vehicle-specific regulations including vehicle insurance and registration to ensure the accuracy of vehicle records. Over the next five years, TCD expects to recover approximately $11 million in lost revenue from unlicensed vehicles on the island’s roadways and reduce the number of non-compliant vehicles to less than 1 percent.
In later stages of the program adoption, EVR will enable compliance monitoring of commercial vehicles operating in restricted areas during rush hours without a permit and issue corresponding citations for non-compliant vehicles.
“The flexibility of the technology to work within the unique island environment and distinct installation and system requirements, requiring both fixed and mobile scenarios, was essential,” Rochester continued.
The system will verify vehicle registration compliance via a network of fixed reader points throughout the island, transportable tripod-mounted readers and handheld readers. The system operates via technology that is similar to electronic tolling, popular in high volume traffic centers around the world.
The EVR system, designed and developed by TransCore and being deployed in Bermuda in conjunction with 3M, consists of RFID tags, antennas, readers and a combination of in-lane transaction management and a host computer database system.
A violation processing system (VPS), also provided by TransCore, will automatically generate resulting citations. The system creates incident records and only retains photo images of non-compliant vehicles.
A unique electronic identification code is established for each vehicle via a tamper-evident windshield sticker tag and each unique code is securely linked to a record in the centralized vehicle-database. The first step in establishing the EVR system was to equip Bermuda’s motor vehicle population with RFID tags through the vehicle inspection and registration process.
The tag distribution and activation process which began in June 2007 will continue through June 2008 as vehicle registrations cycle through renewals and new registrations are processed. Once all vehicle registrations have been updated to reflect EVR activation, the system will become fully operational.
In the United States, an estimated five to 10 percent of motorists fail to legally register their vehicles, resulting in lost annual state revenues of between $720 million and $1.44 billion.
Outside the United States, some government agencies report that as many as 30 to 40 percent of vehicles on the roadway may not be legally registered resulting in major economic and enforcement issues for municipality, state and federal governments. | | | | Reads : 311 | | | |
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