Users report abandoned vehicles by clicking on the map

Sussex Police Force asked Multimap to develop a web-based service to help combat the growing problem of abandoned cars littering the countryside. Multimap's Abandoned Vehicle Finder is a unique mapping tool that allows members of the public to report the precise location of an abandoned vehicle to the police.

Visitors to the Sussex Police website are able to search for a map of the general location of the abandoned vehicle they want to report. They then zoom in to locate precisely the lay-by or road where they last saw the vehicle in question. The map is part of the online form for reporting abandoned vehicles on the Sussex Police website, which visitors can then send electronically through to Sussex Police's central database.

The Multimap service was facilitated by the Government-sponsored Invest to Save scheme with the support of the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO).

Detective Inspector Merv Wyeth, web contact manager for the Force, says: "We went to Multimap with what was essentially a communication problem - members of the public were struggling to describe the obscure places, such as lay-bys and rural tracks, where abandoned cars are often left. The Abandoned Vehicle Finder service will give the public a tool that allows them to pinpoint, on an online map, the precise location of the vehicle. If this service proves successful in Sussex, there's no reason why other regions shouldn't adopt it."

This isn't the first time that Multimap has worked with Sussex Police. Sussex Police recently launched a police station finder service on their website, which allows users to find their nearest police station by simply entering the name of the town or the postcode of their current location.

The Abandoned Vehicle Finder is an innovative service which aims to provide the public with an easy way of reporting the vehicles, and will allow Sussex Police to deal with them more efficiently. It's just one of many ways in which mapping and location services can be used to enhance information services on the web.