POLICE ALL ACROSS Europe are taking part in a 24-hour clampdown on speeding and gardaí are doing their best not to get left behind.
The initiative is being led by by TISPOL, the European Traffic Police Network, who are calling the 24-hour blitz a “speed enforcement marathon”.
Gardaí have taken up the challenge and say that in less than three hours this morning, their GoSafe speed van checked 6,130 vehicles and detected 36 vehicles speeding.
Other garda units are using hand held speed guns to carry out speed checks:
Th 24-hour initiative was first introduced in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia where the public are being asked to vote on the locations where they would like more speed checks to be carried out.
TISPOL’s president and Dublin-based chief superintendent Aidan Reid says police across Europe are being encouraged to share the locations of the checks. This, he says, is to discourage speeding and reassure people that the initiative is not about collecting fines:
There are 727 locations, known as “speed enforcement zones” where the safety cameras operate, and which have a history of fatal and serious injury collisions. To inform and protect motorists we publish these high risk locations on the garda website, so drivers can become familiar with where they are, but most importantly contribute to making the roads safer by slowing down.
European police forces are also being encouraged to tweet about their speed checks using the rather clunkily-titled hashtag #TISPOLOpSpeed
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