Quiet control room
Thursday, 21 October 2021
It's getting quieter in the Stichting IMN control room. Since the start of this month, Stichting IMN's National Central Reporting Point (LCM) has been receiving the majority of its incident reports in the form of an electronic message. In the space of a few months, three out of five Rijkswaterstaat traffic control centres have swapped telephone communications with the LCM for digital incident reporting. The Central Netherlands Traffic Control Centre had already taken this step in july 2020 The North and East Netherlands Traffic Control Centre is scheduled to follow in November.
Marcel Bosch (L) and Dirk Wolf of Kraan- en Bergingsbedrijf Stouwdam in a big clean-up on the A28 at Wezep on 6 October 2021. The accident was reported by EDO (photo credit: Stefan Verkerk).
Electronic reports are not new to the LCM. There has been an electronic procedure in place to coordinate the work of recovery companies for many years. And since February 2019, the LCM has also been processing digital reports sent by Flitsmeister. These are reports of accidents made by road users in the Flitsmeister platform, that are verified in the system developed by Stichting IMN for the Electronic Detection of Accidents (for which the Dutch acronym is EDO).
The screen that the traffic control centres use to relay accident reports to the LCM
The number of EDO reports has risen steeply in the past few months. This is a consequence of the fact that the EDO verification process is based on the detection of traffic congestion. Now that there is more traffic on the road, traffic jams build up quicker in the aftermath of collisions. The result of this is that EDO can detect accidents more easily. In the third quarter, EDO reported 652 accidents. That is 13% of the total number of accidents that was reported to the LCM in this quarter. EDO reports generally arrive more than five minutes earlier than the report that the LCM receives on the same accident from the police or Rijkswaterstaat. So the system makes an important contribution to accelerating incident management on IM roads.