White light enforcement’ pilot

The Tennessee Department of Transportation is planning to undertake a pilot programme into the use of ‘white light enforcement’ in the city of Hendersonville. The technology, which has been deployed in Florida and Texas, uses a white light on top of a street light that can be seen from any direction. Unlike red light enforcement systems when a camera takes a photo of a red light running incident, the white light system flashes an alert to a police officer stationed nearby that an infringement has occurred with the motorist being stopped and issued a citation on the spot.

It’s a system that both the mayor of Hendersonville, Scott Foster, and police chief, Terry Frizzell, prefer. As Foster explained to The Tennessean newspaper, when Hendersonville was looking at using red light cameras, it found that a large portion of the money generated goes to the camera companies. “It creates a lot of income for the camera company, and we’re trying to make it a safety-related issue. I don’t want a bunch of tickets written, I want our intersections to be safe,” he said.

Frizzell favours the white light programme because it requires “human interaction, objectivity and good judgment.”

“We’re a community-oriented organisation,” Frizzell told The Tennessean. “We want to save lives and prevent crashes, and we want to have human interaction between our community and our police department.”

Tennessee Department of Transportation spokesperson, Julie Oaks, told ITS International that when TDOT began looking to implement a pilot study programme on white light enforcement, the city of Hendersonville was the appropriate size. “We are going to be looking at a possible large municipality to conduct another pilot study once this one is complete,” Oaks said.

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