Eyes on the road convince drivers to hang up the phone

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 — which can tell if a driver is using their phone. Their maker, Acusensus, has come 87th in this year’s 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. “It was almost perfectly correlated,” says Alex Jannink, founder and chief executive of Acusensus, of the rise in smartphone use and road deaths.

Jannink’s mission to find a way to combat driver distraction was spurred by personal experience — 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. “There 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,” 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 — which can be temporarily placed along highways or at traffic hotspots — take multiple pictures of a driver passing underneath.

An AI system checks to see if the driver appears to be using a phone — or even whether a phone is on someone’s lap which is illegal in some states of Australia — before passing on the suspected infringements to an enforcement officer. Drivers caught touching their phone while driving are then issued with a fine — about A$387 ($247) in Sydney — 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 — or one in 500 people — 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 “network effect” where infringement levels are low even in areas where the cameras have not been used yet because drivers know they could be caught anywhere.

“It is such endemic behaviour that everyone recognises that it’s dangerous. It’s so obvious. People may think they can speed safely but not using their phone,” 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 — a large adjacent market — 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. “This should be top of mind for everyone. There is no activity more dangerous that you do every day than getting into a car. It’s almost crazy that people accept that level of risk,” he says.