A network of privatised mobile speed enforcement cameras is to go live on the State’s roads from Monday.
The cameras will be rolled out incrementally over the coming months and are expected to be fully operational by February.
Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy and Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern signed a five-year €65 million contract with the GoSafe consortium to provide the service last November following a lengthy tender process.
Under the deal, it was agreed that 45 mobile cameras would provide more than 6,000 hours of speed checks per month across the State.
The development comes almost 12 years after a Fianna Fáil-led government promised to introduce a such a network. It is the first time in the history of the Garda that a key element of day to day policing has been outsourced.
The new cameras, which will be housed in clearly marked vans, will periodically monitor some 600 areas, more than 60 of which are in Dublin, identified as regular sites for speed related road traffic collisions.
It is intended that the cameras will perform speed checks on the various stretches of road at times when crashes have been known to occur on them in the past.
A list of the areas that will be monitored by the cameras is available from the traffic section of the Garda website at www.garda.ie. Such was the level of public interest in the locations that the Garda website crashed periodically today.
The new contract will have no impact on speeding enforcement currently carried out by the Garda.
The force uses eight mobile cameras in vans, 400 hand-held speeding devices and more than 100 automatic number plate recognition cameras which are installed in Garda cars for checks that capture about 200,000 speeding motorists annually.
Motorists caught speeding by the new cameras will be liable to incur penalty points and fines, which will be administered by the Garda.
The GoSafe consortium is being paid a flat fee to provide the service and there is no provision for commission or bonuses irrespective of how many motorists are caught speeding.
The secretary general of the Department of Justice, Seán Aylward, previously estimated the proposed network may generate half a million speeding penalties a year.
At €80 per speeding fine, the privatised speed cameras alone could generate roughly €40 million a year.
A Garda spokesman said the cameras were not being installed as a revenue gathering exercise but were a means to improve safety levels on the State’s roads.
The consortium, led by the Spectra company, will be directed by the Garda and run by gardaí operating in the Garda Office for Safety Camera Management.
A Road Collision Factbook produced earlier this year by the Road Safety Authority shows that in single-vehicle crashes speed was cited as the main contributory factor in 54 per cent of cases.
When two vehicles were involved in a fatal crash speed was deemed to be the main cause in only 15 per cent of cases, with driving on the wrong side of the road causing 52 per cent of these.
