Vehicles that park in the bus lane “for a moment”, as their drivers usually apologize, are exposed from May to being fined by a car equipped with the latest technology that will spend the day traveling in the lanes reserved for public transport to hunt down offenders. Starting today, it will be seen everywhere, dressed in attractive white and red vinyl, without any type of camouflage, although for the first two months it will work on a trial basis and without fines.
Both private vehicles stopped in the bus lane and vans that carry out loading and unloading tasks in it will be subject to financial penalties. Motorcycles – and some cars – that tend to sneak into the moving bus lane will not receive, for now, any fine. In that case they may be sanctioned by the Urban Police officers, as is already the case now, although a fairly generous wide range prevails.
In the new vehicle, two cameras installed on the roof allow, on the one hand, to read the license plate of the offending vehicle and, on the other, to read the context to ensure on a technical level that the car or van in question is stopped in a bus lane. and not making a turning or merging maneuver from a service lane or similar. The technological system is the same one used by a vehicle from the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) to control cars that circulate without a label in the low emissions zone.
The invention brings back to the scene a type of sanctioning vehicle that was launched in 2004 and operated until 2012. At that time it was in charge of the Urban Police. Now it does so at the hands of Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) personnel, who will travel as a pair in the vehicle without the need for any police on board after the delegation of sanctioning powers to TMB through a mayoral decree signed by the mayor of Barcelona. Jaume Collboni, who gives the green light to an agreement signed by the City Council and the public company in 2021 and which had not been developed until now.
In the new car there will be a worker from the public transport company driving and another operating the tablet through which detected infractions are channeled, both automatically and manually. From that same device, the data is sent to the Institut Municipal d'Hisenda to issue the corresponding fine, which will range between 60 and 200 euros, depending on whether the driver is inside or has left it parked.
The vehicle, a 100% electric Nissan Leaf with the explicit indication “Bus lane photographic control”, will circulate through the streets of the city following a previously planned route. Aware that with a single vehicle it is impossible to cover the 221.8 kilometers of bus lanes in the Catalan capital, its scope of action will focus on areas where a higher level of non-compliance with regulations has been detected. TMB hopes in this way to improve the commercial speed of the bus, one of the burdens of this means of transport that makes it less attractive due to the slowness it suffers in certain areas of the city.
Stricter control of respect for the bus lane is precisely one of the historical demands of driving personnel. In addition to affecting the speed of the bus, cars parked in the lane reserved for public transport force drivers to carry out maneuvers behind the wheel of 12 or 18 meter vehicles to avoid those who have decided to stop where they cannot do so. . In this sense, the CEO of TMB, Xavier Flores, rejects any desire for collection and emphasizes that the incorporation of the photographic control car "improves road safety and reduces accidents."
All in all, the proposal of a single car driving around Barcelona is far from the measure implemented in New York, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has sanctioning cameras installed on the fronts of 623 buses that cover 21 routes to fine drivers. cars blocking bus lanes from the vehicle itself. Starting in May they will also begin to penalize motorists who block their path.
