Ot­to Car­ring­ton

The Na­tion­al Traf­fic Man­age­ment Cen­tre (NTMC) is ex­pect­ed to get over 100 cam­eras to mon­i­tor and man­age traf­fic on the na­tion’s roads, as the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port and oth­er agen­cies meet in a week to dis­cuss ra­dio fre­quen­cy iden­ti­fi­ca­tion for li­cence plates for ve­hi­cles.

The cen­tre be­came op­er­a­tional on Ju­ly 3, 2012, as a pi­lot ini­tia­tive in Port-of-Spain. The project was fund­ed by the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank through a grant val­ued at US$ 500,000

Speak­ing at the ex­pan­sion launch at the Ca­roni Li­cens­ing Of­fice, Ca­roni, In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank pres­i­dent Ilan Gold­fa­jn said, “It’s in the heart of our abil­i­ty to pro­vide bet­ter ser­vices, im­prove the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment, and be­come more ef­fec­tive and ef­fi­cient. As I men­tioned, now we are us­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and in­tel­li­gence to save lives and to make the lives of peo­ple bet­ter.

“So­ci­eties de­mand bet­ter trans­porta­tion. They want to spend less time in tran­sit and to be more se­cure. It’s great to see the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go tak­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion so se­ri­ous­ly. And we are very glad to be part of this se­ri­ous prob­lem.”

He added, “This is a mod­el for many oth­er coun­tries, and the IDB has a plat­form for so­lu­tions to the prob­lems coun­tries have. Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion al­so brings new op­por­tu­ni­ties and opens new ori­gins. It helps us un­lock the coun­try’s po­ten­tial and hence helps us un­der­pin com­pet­i­tive­ness, in­no­va­tion, and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for the fu­ture. We have set up the IDB’s cur­rent coun­try strat­e­gy with Trinidad and To­ba­go. Now we know dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion can help us bet­ter serve cit­i­zens.”

NTMC’s ex­pan­sion launch al­so re­vealed its pi­lot ve­hi­cle, which will al­low the cen­tre to have ef­fi­cient road map­ping an­a­lyt­ics that can as­sist in road man­age­ment, along with road us­age wear and tear.

The cen­tre is cur­rent­ly us­ing cam­eras from the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty.

Asked how many cam­eras were cur­rent­ly work­ing with­in the net­work, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said, “I don’t want to speak for na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty. What I can tell you is that they have of­fered to al­low us a link to sev­er­al cam­eras. I don’t know how much that will be and I don’t know how many cam­eras they have work­ing or how many cam­eras they don’t have work­ing. That is a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty mat­ter which I will stay away from but it doesn’t hin­der op­er­a­tions be­cause, as we get ac­cess to the cam­eras, we just bring them on­to the sys­tem.

Sinanan added, “So, we are hop­ing that by next week, we should have a cou­ple of hun­dred cam­eras be­ing mon­i­tored. As I said, the whole gist of this is re­al­ly traf­fic man­age­ment. So, we will choose cam­eras, that, you know, we will use cam­eras that as­sist us with traf­fic man­age­ment and there is al­so a by-prod­uct that you can ac­tu­al­ly help with na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty But it is not a site that is de­signed to mon­i­tor na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.”