Sharlien Tjambari
In her capacity as the road safety patron, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, Nandi-Ndaitwah Netumbu inaugurated the Interim Arandis Emergency Response and Traffic Management Centre on Monday this week.
Nandi-Ndaitwah said Namibia’s road safety performance has been of concern for both government and the road users through the years. This is on account of the hundreds of lives the country, despite the small population, continue to lose every year.
According to Nandi-Ndaitwah, contemporary records show on average, Namibia loses about 700 lives per year, which translates into 27 lives per hundred thousand inhabitants. Being small in terms of demographics, this is a death toll the country and the economy cannot afford in-definitely.
“The Arandis Emergency Response and Traffic Management Centre is indeed a flagship project as it endeavours to infuse a new way of how driver sanity could be restored on our roads particularly the project coverage area. The Arandis Emergency Response and Traffic Management Centre is one of its kind in the country. It embraces the latest technology in the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). It enables real-time 24/7 surveillance of the affected road section. The Centre’s cap-ability will not only enable timely response should something happen but will also enable adequate and appropriate response within the golden hour rule,” Nandi-Ndaitwah said.
Nandi-Ndaitwah said she is fully supportive of the project and its desired impact on the country’s road safety landscape. The Chairman of the National Road Safety Council (NRSC), Eliphas !Owos-ôab said this day stands out as an indelible milestone in the country’s road safety history for one good reason, reason being this initiative is different and innovative in the Namibian context being the very first of its kind. According to !Owos-oâb the Interim Centre’s costs amounted to N$27 650 000 (inclusive of Professional fees for the Consultants; Office furniture; one-year operational costs; potable temporary structure; all the roadside equipment; military-grade communications network; three VMS (mobile, tactical and static); Computer infrastructure (both hard and software); security cameras; air conditioners, and the rest of other equipment.
The total estimated cost of covering the entire road from Usakos to Swakopmund and the construction of a fully-fledged centre is estimated at N$185 200 000.
AERTMC presents a novel, extensible multi-camera video surveillance system which supports the detection, tracking and classification of objects moving within the supervised area and can be applied in a broad field of applications in the future. Primarily, the system seeks to monitor the conditions of driver behaviour and vehicle movement, real-time.