The road safety implications of Automatic Number Plate Recognition Technology (ANPR)

Abstract

This submission has been prepared in response to the Parliamentary Travelsafe Committee’s Inquiry into Automatic Number Plate Recognition Technology. This submission will outline how automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) works, its history and application, as well as some key privacy and data management issues. After outlining evaluations that have been undertaken of ANPR and highlighting some limitations, the submission will examine the implications of the technology for road safety.
The primary focus of this submission is on the potential of ANPR to both detect and deter a range of illegal road user behaviours including unlicensed driving, the driving of unregistered and uninsured vehicles, speeding, and the noncompliance of heavy vehicle drivers with driving hour regulations and novice drivers with provisional licence requirements. To this end, the submission will review different options for deploying ANPR, the risks associated with these different approaches, and how the likely road safety benefits of the technology could be maximised. To assist in this process, a set of principles is presented that can be used to assess the potential road safety benefits of ANPR technology.