Keeping Israel’s roads safe and working with police

In amongst over 200 defence and security companies, MONS was approached at ISDEF 2017 by Safe Lane, a small non-profit organisation that believes in a simple mission: making the roads safer. “Safe Lane currently includes five people working full time and thirty volunteers, all of us committed to making the roads a safer place after a tragic event has occurred to someone we know,” says Chai Sokoloff, business development manager at Safe Lane.

Safe Lane is an application that currently 5000 volunteers have downloaded on their phones in Israel, and which allows them to report severe driving infringements in real time. “Basically if one of the volunteers sees someone behaving in a way that could endanger the life of other drivers, the volunteer gives a voice command to start filming and subsequently to send the video, along with the voice file, to Safe Lane,” continues Mr Sokoloff. Safe Lane staff and volunteers then decide if the video goes to the police or if it only warrants a warning (sent by letter).

Safe Lane has received offers by 20,000 people who would like to volunteer and use the application, but currently it is possible due to a lack of manpower to process all the information. “We receive 4000 events per month, some incidents cannot be dealt with early enough,” concludes Mr Sokoloff. “We have managed to get retired police offircers to volunteer to look at the videos, so it helps, but we are still hoping to develop further to keep roads safer.”

Dr. Alix Valenti