By summer, speed traps on highways should always be active, with no tolerance margins. Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld) announced this at VTM NIEUWS after a successful pilot project on seven highways.
Because the processing capacity is limited, tolerance margins in Wallonia and Brussels and quotas have been used for speed checks in Flanders. This means that flashes are only used much above the legal speed limit, or that the speed cameras do not work half the time.
30,000 additional fines
In October a pilot project started in several places whereby those tolerance margins and quotas were abolished. On five Walloon routes, flashing was used from 129 km/h instead of 141 km/h. On two Flemish routes, the route checks worked permanently instead of two weeks a month. This yielded results: the abolition of the quota logically resulted in a doubling of the chance of being caught. The abolition of the tolerance margin on the Walloon highways, on the other hand, led to five times more speeding violations. Some 30,000 additional fines were issued during the test.
temporary
This increase is temporary, Van Quickenborne expects. “We know from experience elsewhere that in less than a year, the number of detected offenses will return to normal levels as people adjust their driving habits and moderate speed.”
Where the tolerance margins were abolished, the average corrected speed decreased from 130 to 120 kilometers per hour, which, according to research by the traffic institute VIAS, represents enormous progress for road safety. The risk of fatalities would decrease by more than 30 percent.
Additional resources
The police and the public prosecutor’s office are given extra resources to deal with fines. According to the minister, 58 extra forces will be deployed this year in the regional processing centers of the federal police, which are responsible for drawing up the reports. The public prosecutor’s offices and the police courts will also be reinforced.
Last year, 484 people died as a result of accidents on Belgian roads. In 2019, before corona had an impact on traffic, there were 644. That is proportionally a lot more than in many other European countries.
View the studio interview with Minister Van Quickenborne in full here:
Flanders will receive 161 extra section checks: check here where you risk a speeding fine
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