Prosecutor against cities' appeal for municipal speed cameras

The Public Prosecution Service (OM) is against the four large cities’ appeal to the national government to let them install their own speed cameras to improve road safety. The OM fears a proliferation of speed cameras, which would not make the streets safer, prosecutor Lieseth Schuijer of the OM department that manages speed cameras in the Netherlands told AD.

Last month, the mayors of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht sent a letter to the national government, asking it to let them install their own speed cameras, among other things. According to the mayors, there are too many accidents due to reckless driving and speeding and the OM is often reluctant or slow to respond to requests for speed cameras.

According to Schuijer, the OM agrees that there are too many accidents, but more speed cameras are not the way to reduce them. She thinks that enforcement with speed cameras should be the last step taken if other measures don’t work well enough. She suggested campaigns to change motorists’ behavior and adapt the roads. “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. Then you first have to adjust the road before you can start credibly enforcing it,” she said.

Changing the infrastructure is a costly and timely project, but according to Schuijer, cities can achieve a lot with cheaper, interim solutions. “Think of flower boxes along the road or light signals. A good example is the Coolsingel in Rotterdam, where flashing lights on the road surface warn of pedestrian crossings. That encourages us to slow down.”

Schuijer said that allowing municipalities to install their own speed cameras will lead to major regional differences in traffic control and undermine the support for paying speeding fines. She added that the OM plans to significantly expand the number of speed cameras in the coming years, to cameras in 1,200 places by 2029. “With this, we can make a significant contribution to making the most risky places in the Netherlands safer. Municipalities can certainly make suggestions for this.”