International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering

Website: [Link] (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 9, September 2013)

Impact of Car Radar Gun on Road Traffic Safety in Rwanda

Celestin Twizere
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, National University of Rwanda, Avenue de l’Université, P.O Box 117
Butare Rwanda
Abstract—This paper presents an impact of car radar gun Navy, discovered that when radio waves were broadcast
on road traffic safety in Rwanda. Rwanda is a country which at 60 MHz it was possible to determine the range and
is in the way of development. After genocide against Tutsi bearing of nearby ships in the Potomac River. Serious
happened in our country in 1994; the government enforces the investigation began eight years later after the discovery that
technology in the different institutions. The Rwanda National
radar could be used to track airplanes [2].
Police has contributed in safety of population, therefore
introduced the system of detecting the speed of vehicles on Before the Second World War, researchers in France,
different roads of country for decreasing the rate of accidents Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union,
caused by over speeding. the United Kingdom, and the United States, independently
The major target of this paper is to verify if the application and in great secrecy, developed technologies that led to the
of radar gun on different roads in Rwanda has decreased the modern version of radar.
number of accidents. This radar is used for detecting the Full radar evolved as a pulsed system, and the first such
speed of vehicles for the reasons of catching the drivers who elementary apparatus was demonstrated in December 1934
are driving over the speed limits. by the American Robert M. Page, working at the Naval
The main problem is the amount of accidents which
Research Laboratory [3].
happen every day on the roads of country, so the use of radar
gun was introduced as the solution to this problem. The World War II precipitated research to find better
The radar gun brought some changes on the roads, before resolution, more portability, and more features for radar.
using radar gun , the amounts of the accidents were a lot, but The postwar years have seen the use of radar in fields as
with the use of this instrument there is safety improvement on diverse as air traffic control, weather monitoring,
the roads as shown by the data obtained from Rwanda astrometry, and road speed control.
National Police. Current efforts to address road safety are minimal in
comparison to this growing human suffering. According to
Keywords—Detection of vehicles speed, Radar gun, Safety
those injuries and deaths the World Health and the World
improvement.
Bank have jointly produced the world report in traffic
injury prevention. Its purpose is to present a comprehensive
I. INTRODUCTION
overview of what is known about the magnitude, risk
Several inventors, scientists, and engineers contributed factors and impact of road traffic injuries and about ways to
to the development of radar[1]. Heinrich Hertz showed that prevent and lessen the impact of road crashes. With the
radio waves could be reflected from solid objects. In 1895, outcome of the report, Rwanda is among of countries
Alexander Popov, developed an apparatus using a coherent where the accidents are considerably[4,8]. So accordingly
tube for detecting distant lightning strikes. For detecting to this issue, the government of Rwanda has seen that the
objects in the next year, he added a spark-gap transmitter. safety in the road must be supported because the safety in
During 1897, while testing this in communicating between the road is one important thing in human life. In that case
two ships in the Baltic Sea, he took note of an interference the government of Rwanda takes care on this domain of
beat caused by the passage of a third vessel. security in the road known as traffic police, for giving it,
The German Christian Huelsmeyer was the first to use the different materials included a radar gun to detect a car
radio waves to detect "the presence of distant metallic speed. Rwanda traffic police uses RADAR (Radio
objects". In 1904 he demonstrated the feasibility of Detection And Ranging) of type ‘’ Falcon HR Radar
detecting a ship in dense fog, but not its distance. system’’.
In August 1917, Nikola Tesla outlined a concept for
primitive radar units. In 1922 A. Hoyt Taylor and Leo C.
Young, researchers working with the U. S.

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 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: [Link] (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 9, September 2013)

Fig I. The probability of death when the speed is increasing[4]

II. THEORITICAL ANALYSIS

RADAR as Radio Detection And Ranging is an
Fig II. Block diagram of radar system[5,7]
electronic tool which uses electromagnetic waves to detect
and locate moving or fixed objects. For their daily job, the The apparent difference between the frequency at which
police use this useful tool to track the vehicle speed. In this sound or light waves leave a source and that at which they
order the study of Radar Gun used by Rwanda National reach an observer, caused by relative motion of the
Police is one Decatur Speed Track Police Radar. Figure 2 is observer and the wave source. This phenomenon is used in
the block diagram who explain the principle of a Radar in astronomical measurement, in radar and modern
general[5,9]. navigation. It was first described in 1842 by Austrian
There are two types of Radar Gun, the Pulse Radar who physicist Christian Doppler[7]. Consider the flowing signal
sends out signals in short few millionths of a second but as transmitted signal:
powerful bursts or pulses and the Continuous-Wave Radar
who sends out continuous signal instead of short bursts. ST (t )  cos(2f 0t   ) (1)
The principle of a Continuous Radar is based on Doppler The received signal is attenuated and delayed response of
effect in order to measure the speed of the objet[6]. the transmitted signal
S R (t )  kST (t  2R(t ) / c) (2)

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 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: [Link] (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 9, September 2013)
The phase shift introduced is proportional to the distance The table and the figure III below presents annually
of the target accidents from 2005 – 2010.
4 TABLE II
 (t )   f o R(t ) (3) ANNUALLY ACCIDENTS FROM 2005 – 2010[10]
c
Year 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
When the target moves, the distance varies together with Accidents 548 414 411 288 366 415
the phase; the variation of the instantaneous frequency is Per Year
the derivative of the phase shift,
For analyzing data, we present them in the following
1 d 1 4 dR(t )
fD   (t )   f0 (4) diagram as figure III.
2 dt 2 c dt
Where : α is an initial phase
c, fo are respectively velocity and frequency of emitted
signal
R(t) is the distance to the target
K is attenuation coefficient
The Doppler frequency is proportional to the change in
distance over time that is to say, is proportional to the
radial velocity of the target, as the following formula
presents.
2 f0 2
fD   r   r (5)
c 

III. DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

The data used in this section are collected from Rwanda
National Police about the accidents caused by over
speeding. Data analysis is done with Microsoft Excel
program. Table below presents monthly accidents from
2005-2010[10].
TABLE I
MONTHLY ACCIDENTS FROM 2005 – 2010[10] Fig [Link] accidents from 2005 – 2010[10]

Year 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 To show impact of car radar gun on our roads, we have
Month to consider the following factors: the number of accidents
Jan 47 32 25 23 22 20 registered in different years and the vehicles existed in
those years. So with the comparison of data registered
Feb 51 33 37 28 25 53
before and after the use of radar gun shows that in the first
Mar 61 30 40 24 25 42
three years the amount of accidents reported in traffic
Apr 45 43 22 32 26 36
police caused by over speeding was on highest rate with the
May 53 43 17 31 37 31 number of vehicles was in that period. With the
Jun 44 45 33 22 26 30 development of Rwanda country in all domains, including
Jul 42 27 50 23 43 24 the field of transport on land is developing on every day
Aug 57 43 49 32 31 59 hence in the last three years the data registered from 2008
Sept 47 27 38 26 34 30 to 2010 with the use of technology of car radar gun on road
Oct 40 26 33 23 26 47 traffic safety in order to detect the speed of vehicles,
Nov 31 30 41 24 26 35 according to the above histogram shows that the number of
Dec 30 35 29 0 45 28 accidents was decreased even if the accidents still
happened.

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 International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering
Website: [Link] (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 9, September 2013)
IV. CONCLUSION RNP may use also the radar guns across the country and
The main objective is to verify if the application of radar to establish a system of using the patrol cars on which the
gun on different roads of Rwanda decreased the number of radar guns are mounted.
accidents. The radar gun used to detect the speed of In the future, we need to focus on a Radar Gun network
vehicles by sending electromagnetic waves to object in order to have a good system tracking over speed
(vehicles), thereafter it receives the reflected waves and vehicles.
after processing it can be easy to recover the speed of the REFERENCES
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