Road safety chiefs say Garda speed trap list most accurate

ROAD safety chiefs said they have no major difficulty with a website publishing the details of Garda speed traps — but they claim it can never be as accurate as the list the Garda itself releases.

Spokesman for the Road Safety Authority, Brian Farrell said the Irishspeedtraps.ie website was made redundant by the database Gardaí has put online.

“We actually encourage people to go online and find out where the speed traps are but the list to look at is on the Garda website not at Irishspeedtraps.ie.

“The Gardaí have published the list of all the most dangerous stretches of road and these are the areas it will be concentrating on with speed traps,” he said.

The website www.garda.ie/angarda/statistics98/cpz_ June2007.xls categorises each of the most dangerous roads by the number of accidents and the seriousness.

Mr Farrell said the Garda speeding offences statistics released this week show Gardaí are penalising people who are offending in the most dangerous areas, in zones below 80km/hour.

“We want people to know where the speed cameras will be, we do not want people to get caught speeding, we want to them to stop speeding,” he said.

The Irishspeedtraps website is aiming to establish a map of all the regular locations for where Gardaí locate speed cameras.

It is adamant the speed traps are fixed to catch easy targets rather than concentrate on high-risk areas.

Its list includes the places where automated speed cameras are mounted, although it relies on members of the public to report locations.

At the moment, it is mostly Dublin locations until more places are identified.

A spokesman for the website, who did not give his name, said the Gardaí are choosing places to catch motorists based on revenue rather than the risks involved.

“We do not have a problem with speed traps but we do not see why they have to be on dual-carriageways where there is the least amount of risk.

“We want the Gardaí to concentrate on areas where the dangers are, not shooting fish in a barrel, places where there are no fatalities,” he said.

The website spokesman denied it is trying to get people off the hook and said in Britain speed traps are advertised by the police to encourage a constant culture of people slowing down.

He said it cannot accept the Gardaí are selecting locations fairly until the full details of where speeding offences take place are published along with the rate of detection.