Record number of motorists caught speeding
During the first 6 months of the year more than two million speeding offences were recorded on Belgian roads. The figures come from the Federal Police Service and appear in this week’s edition of the Sunday freesheet ‘7 Dimanche’. Never before were so many motorists caught as in the period between January and June 2019.
During the first 6 months of years the police issued 2,066,930 speeding fines. This is more than 100,000 more than the 1,927,763 speeding fines that were issued during the first 6 months of last year.
Of these 1.5 million were for motorists caught speeding in Flanders (+7.7%). The sharpest rise in the number of motorists caught speeding was in the Brussels-Capital Region, where 28% more speeding fines were issued during the first 6 months of this year than was the case during the first half of 2018. While there were 142,226 cases of motorists being caught speeding in the Brussels-Capital Region from 1 January to 30 June, in Wallonia there were 430,375 such cases, an increase of 0.7% on the same period last year.
Stef Willems of the road safety institute Vias told the paper that the reason why proportionally so many more speeding motorists are caught in Flanders than elsewhere in Belgium is that there are more speed cameras and speed traps along Flemish roads.
Furthermore, "In recent years more has been invested in automatic systems such as trajectory speed control. However, this would appear to be necessary given that the number of road traffic deaths rose during the first six months of the year. Excess speed is the cause of one in three fatal accidents”, Mr Willems added.