Birmingham Clean Air Zone
Siemens Mobility will provide APNR camera system to monitor the clean air zone in Birmingham. the UK. Credit: Birmingham City Council.

Siemens Mobility has secured a contract to design, supply and install cameras to monitor the clean air zone in Birmingham, UK.

The company will install its clean air zone automatic number plate recognition (APNR) camera solutions across the city to monitor and enforce laws that prohibit polluting vehicles from entering the zone.

This move is expected to improve the quality of air across the city centre.

Intended to be fully operational around July next year, the zone will monitor all Class D vehicles such as cars, buses, coaches, taxis, private hire vehicles and light and heavy goods vehicles.

Siemens Mobility worked with Birmingham City Council’s Department for Transport’s Joint Air Quality Unit and other partners to develop the system.

The solution is expected to work alongside the present APNR systems that monitor the use of bus lanes in the city.

Birmingham City Council councillor Waseem Zaffar 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 estimate that the technology will record the details of approximately 200,000 vehicles each day.

This information will be integrated with the UK’s national clean air zone database to enforce vehicle checking and payments.

In May, Siemens Mobility established an intelligent traffic systems office just outside Detroit in Sterling Heights, Michigan, US.