Public Prosecution Service is not interested in municipalities’ own speed camera policy: “Not safer”

If it were up to the Public Prosecution Service, they would continue to determine where a speed camera could be placed. The big cities wanted boas to be able to carry out traffic checks and to be allowed to install speed cameras themselves, but the Public Prosecution Service sees no point in this. According to the justice department, traffic does not become safer from a proliferation of speed cameras.

At the beginning of March, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague wrote a letter to the cabinet asking for more powers to enforce road safety. One of the points was that the municipalities wanted to have the choice of installing speed cameras in the city. “That would help us improve road safety and enforce the new speed limit,” traffic councilor Melanie van der Horst responded at the time. The income from this enforcement would then go back to a ‘road safety fund’ of the municipality itself.

Sprawl

But chief officer Liesbeth Schuijer of the Central Processing Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is responsible for the installation and management of speed cameras, calls the extra powers undesirable. “The Netherlands will not become safer by filling it with speed cameras,” Schuijer said in Algemeen Dagblad.

Schuijer fears that if municipalities are given the authority to install the cabinets, real proliferation will occur on Dutch roads. According to the chief officer, this could lead to an increase in unjustified traffic fines. “It can put pressure on the sense of justice and undermine support for speed cameras.”

Adjust road

According to the chief officer, the reason why the sense of justice would decrease is partly because it must remain credible that you are allowed to drive a certain speed somewhere. “If motorists have to drive 30 kilometers per hour on a two-lane road, you make it very difficult for drivers to stick to that speed,” says Schuijer. The way to solve that is to adjust the road. The way municipalities already have to do it.