PEGASUS CAUGHT FIVE TIMES MORE SPEEDERS

The Directorate General of Traffic, or DGT, has confirmed the effectiveness of its latest addition in the campaign of reducing road traffic fatalities, the dreaded big brother helicopter radar, Pegasus, revealing the statistics that show five times as many speeding motorists were caught by the eye in the sky that would have been snapped using traditional methods.

For a 24 hour in-air period when the results of Pegasus were monitored, during the Easter period of the 8th to the 14th of April, 522 vehicles were monitored from the air, 16% of which were caught speeding, the average ratio for roadside tests normally yields just 3.49% of speeders. In addition to that figure, the number of vehicles monitored was also much higher than is possible from the ground.

Overall, in the week that the special campaign against speed was operated, agents of the Guardia Civil checked 955,659 vehicles, of which 33,328, or 3.49%, were travelling at a higher than permitted speed. On secondary roads, where this campaign was focussed, 61.3% of all vehicle movements were checked.

Whilst Pegasus supported ground teams, 522 vehicles were checked, of which 88 were found speeding and their owners have received sanctions for their inappropriate speed.

The attention was put on secondary roads, rather than motorways, due to the number of fatalities that occur on this type of carriageway. Splitting the data by road type, 585,540 vehicles were checked on conventional roads, of which 21,933 received fines, some 3.75% of those checked, half of whom were dealt with on the roadside. On the motorway network, 370,119 vehicles were checked, of which 11,395 have been fined, slightly less than on the conventional roads at 3.1% of the total checked.

One driver highlighted in the campaign was a motorist caught by a speed trap in La Rioja, found to be driving at 206 kilometres per hour on the N-111, where the speed limit is 100. According has DGT, this type of reckless driving is dealt with as a crime under the Penal Code, when the limit is exceeded by more than 50 kilometres per hour.

For this offense, under Article 379 of the Criminal Code, the driver could be sentenced to a prison term of three to six months, or a fine of six to twelve months, or community service of thirty to ninety days and in any case, the deprivation of the right to drive a motor vehicle for a period of between one and four years.

The rest of speeding offenses are considered not considered as serious or very serious by the Road Safety Act and punished with fines of between 100 and 600 euro, and the loss of two to six points driving license, resulting in speeding drivers being somewhere between three and a quarter and around twenty million euro worse off than when they began their journeys.

Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/38660/

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