Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Asia-Pacific companies myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.For decades, Australia has taken a no-nonsense approach to road safety. In the early 1970s, it was the first country to mandate the wearing of seatbelts in cars and helmets for motorcyclists, and was one of the first to adopt random roadside drink-driving tests.Unlike the highly visible speed cameras used in Europe, speeding drivers are often caught by police officers hiding behind trees, while brutally realistic TV adverts spell out the dangers of driver distraction and speeding. The latest development is a different type of camera \u2014 which can tell if a driver is using their phone. Their maker, Acusensus, has come 87th in this year\u2019s High-Growth Companies Asia-Pacific ranking.Australian road deaths were showing a long-term decline until about a decade ago, with mass smartphone use blamed for diverting eyes from the road and hands away from the steering wheel. \u201cIt was almost perfectly correlated,\u201d says Alex Jannink, founder and chief executive of Acusensus, of the rise in smartphone use and road deaths.Jannink\u2019s mission to find a way to combat driver distraction was spurred by personal experience \u2014 a friend of his was hit and killed in the US by a driver who was texting. He was already working in road safety at traffic camera operator Redflex but struggled to drum up interest in finding a way to catch drivers using their phones. \u201cThere was nobody asking for this. There were no tenders, no demand. We needed to make people aware of the problem and then to say how we were going to solve it,\u201d he said.Back in 2016, there also was not a wide understanding of how artificial intelligence could be harnessed to solve the problem. Acusensus, which he co-founded in 2018, has since developed a system where mobile cameras \u2014 which can be temporarily placed along highways or at traffic hotspots \u2014 take dozens of pictures of a driver passing underneath. An AI system checks to see if the driver appears to be using a phone \u2014 or even whether a phone is on someone\u2019s lap which is illegal in some states of Australia \u2014 before passing on the suspected infringements to an enforcement officer. Drivers caught touching their phone while driving are then issued with a fine \u2014 about A$387 ($247) in Sydney \u2014 as well as demerit points on their licence. Not many drivers challenge the fines as the cameras produce ample evidence. It was initially tough going for Acusensus until it won a trial with the state of New South Wales in 2019, which gave the fledgling company the opportunity to prove that its mobile cameras could have a marked impact on road safety. Jannink pointed to Acusensus analysis of government data that shows fatalities had dropped 20 per cent after the first two years of the NSW trial as drivers became aware of the risks involved. That compares with an 8 per cent rise in road deaths in the rest of Australia at the time. The first trials showed that about 1 per cent of drivers it photographed were actively using their phones before the first fines were issued, according to Acusensus. That has since dropped to around 0.2 per cent \u2014 or one in 500 people \u2014 with Acusensus confident that the number is creeping even lower as more people realise they should not be using their phones while driving and might get caught if they do. The ability of the company to move the cameras around has produced what Jannink calls a \u201cnetwork effect\u201d where infringement levels are low even in areas where the cameras have not been used yet because drivers know they could be caught anywhere.\u201cIt is such endemic behaviour that everyone recognises that it\u2019s dangerous. It\u2019s so obvious. People may think they can speed safely but not using their phone,\u201d Jannink said of how culture has started to change in Australia. Acusensus was able to prove its mobile cameras worked in deterring driver distraction, which paved the way for a listing in 2023. It has since signed contracts in New Zealand and the US. Revenue in the six months to last December rose 16 per cent to A$29mn ($18.3mn) while earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation grew 8 per cent to A$3.4mn. The company has also branched out into other areas of road safety. It conducted a trial detecting drink and drug driving in Cornwall and Devon in the UK over the Christmas period, with its mobile cameras looking for erratic driving to alert police. The company has also developed a safety product for construction and roadside workers \u2014 a large adjacent market \u2014 that will warn them of impending contact from passing cars or machinery on site, which it expects to launch commercially this year. Jannink argues that while drivers adapt to new rules and regulations, many remain desensitised to the risks of driving and look for loopholes. \u201cThis should be top of mind for everyone. There is no activity more dangerous that you do every day than getting into a car. It\u2019s almost crazy that people accept that level of risk,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Asia-Pacific companies myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.For decades, Australia has taken a no-nonsense approach to road safety. In the early 1970s, it was the first country to mandate the wearing of seatbelts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-270243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}