Siemens Mobility wins Birmingham CAZ camera contract

Siemens Mobility Limited has been awarded a contract to design, supply and install the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) ANPR cameras across Birmingham’s city centre.

The cameras will identify and register every vehicle that enters the zone – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and the company expects the system will capture details of around 200,000 vehicles per day.

The information captured by the cameras will then interface with the UK government’s new national CAZ database for vehicle checking and payment.

Siemens Mobility has worked closely with Birmingham City Council, the Department for Transport’s Joint Air Quality Unit and the other programme partners to develop the system that will cover all the major routes within the Middleway Ring Road (but not the Middleway itself).

The system will work alongside an existing Siemens ANPR Camera system which currently monitors and enforces use of the city’s bus lanes within the city boundary.

Cllr Waseem Zaffar from Birmingham City Council said: ‘These cameras will play a key role in helping us to identify non-compliant vehicles entering the Clean Air Zone, which in turn will help us tackle the major public crisis of poor air quality by discouraging the owners of the most polluting vehicles from driving into the city centre.

‘However, we anticipate that the number of non-compliant vehicles entering the Clean Air Zone will gradually drop as more people switch to compliant vehicles or choose cleaner, greener forms of transport instead.’

Siemens Mobility began installing cameras for the Leeds CAZ earlier this summer.

Both Birmingham and Leeds were forced to postpone their CAZ start date of January 2020 – with Birmingham now saying they expect the CAZ to be ‘fully operational’ from July 2020.