Leicestershire Police New Police 3D scanner to reduce congestion after road collisions
Officers at Leicestershire Police unveiled a new device which it is hoped will reduce the time motorists spend waiting for roads to reopen following collisions. The new 3D scanner is set to replace the manual recording of incidents requiring hundreds of separate measurements to just a handful of 3D scans
Purchased by the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency for police forces along the UK’s main arterial routes, the device could save around 30 minutes at each of the thousands of incidents occurring nationally – time the government says currently costs UK trade and industry a shocking £1billion in lost earnings each year.
PC Stuart Bird of the Leicestershire Police Roads Policing Unit was one the first officers in the Force to use the unit at the scene. He said: “We know that waiting for the roads to reopen can be frustrating for motorists. The device will enable us to get traffic flowing again in a shorter time, reducing the inconvenience.
Before the scanner, creating an accurate plan of a scene required an officer to physically ‘walk’ the scene to take the necessary measurements. Now the Force’s new device takes billions of laser measurements in a single scan, building them into a 3D map which can show animations of the incident occurring.
