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Police enforcement policy and programmes on European roads

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The European Union has set out in the 2001 White Paper on transport policy an ambitious goal of halving the number of traffic fatalities over the period of 2000-2010 (European Commission, 2001). The goal was confirmed in 2003 in the Road Safety Action Programme. The White Paper identified a number of principal lines of activity for achieving the target including: - harmonisation of penalties - promotion of new technologies to improve road safety. Traffic enforcement and its mechanism have figured as a subject of research since the late 1940s. Then, the objective of traffic enforcement was 'to implant a feeling of ever-present surveillance by highway patrols' (Irby & Jacobs, 1960), the essential term being 'the feeling of presence' rather than the actual presence of the police. The subjective factor, 'feeling' in the concept of deterrence, was probably first introduced explicitly as subjective risk of detection in the mid-1960s by Brehmer (1966). Enforcement even today is leaning largely on the conception of deterrence, even though the view of deterrence and methods to maintain it have evolved during the past decades. Over the years, a lot of useful information and knowledge has accumulated for developing effective enforcement strategies and tactics. The partners, representing all major traffic safety research institutes in Europe have participated in a number of scientific projects contributing to a common enforcement knowledge base. In many of the European transport safety policies there are safety targets expressed in quantitative terms. Also, included are a number of possible measures in order to meet the targets. The work in Pepper identifies these needs by providing decision makers with: - tools to implement conventional and innovative safety measures in the field of enforcement, - ways of prioritising different enforcement methods and safety measures, and - a proposal and a conceptual model to assess the deployment and impacts of enforcement on a European level, and also the adoption of the Commission Recommendation on Enforcement in the Field of Road Safety. The objective of the Pepper project was to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the police enforcement of road traffic. The project looks critically at all relevant aspects of enforcement, such as target behaviours, the detection of infringements, administrative and legal handling after infringement, decisions concerning the volume, location and timing of enforcement, effects of enforcement on road-user behaviour and accidents, enforcement methods and tools, collection of enforcement data, and enforcement in the social context. Speeding, drink driving and use of seatbelts are especially targeted. The need for improved enforcement data and better understanding of the impacts is recognised, and the potential of innovative technologies in the different links of the enforcement chain is studied. The Pepper project aimed to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the police enforcement of road traffic. More specifically, the project aimed to: - describe and analyse the way Traffic Law Enforcement (TLE) functions in Member States and how it contributes to national road safety work; - explore different stakeholders' views of traffic enforcement in Member States and EU. - develop enforcement data collection systems and databases for monitoring of the use of enforcement resources and describing the impacts on road user behaviour and road safety. Identify the data needs of the police for strategic and tactical planning of operations. Conduct pilot studies in order to test the availability of comparable European wide traffic enforcement data. - explore and analyse possibilities of advanced technology such as machine vision, positioning technologies and new wireless technologies in the detection of violations, traffic enforcement data transfer and communication, paying attention to cost-effectiveness and cross-border enforcement. - evaluate the impacts of enforcement on road user behaviour and accidents. Explore and make recommendations for good practices in TLE based on scientific analysis of the effects. Analyse the cost-effectiveness of various enforcement methods. Develop indicators for the effectiveness of TLE.

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