Gardaí expect the penalty points system to restrain mature drivers who don't worry about the cost of fines. Joe Humphreys reports.
Young, testosterone-charged drivers tend to get blamed for all the ills othe road.
But according to gardaí, it is not so much Boy Racer as Monied Man who fits the profile of the recidivist speeding driver.
While there are no Garda records showing the breakdown of road offenders, anecdotal evidence suggests that many frequent speeders are businessmen, particularly those for whom road travel is a central part of the job.
"If you look at people doing 45 m.p.h. in a 30 m.p.h. zone there's a more equal split of male and female drivers," said a Garda spokesman.
"But if you look at the higher speeds it's nearly always male, across a wide range of ages. We are also finding a lot of speeding in the morning and evening when people are rushing home from work."
He said one factor in speeding that particularly applied to lorry drivers and travelling salesmen was "work pressure".
He added that gardaí had come across drivers who had accumulated large numbers of speeding fines and for whom the financial penalties were not a deterrent.
"The number of individuals involved in that kind of activity is very low but hopefully the penalty points system will put an end to it altogether," he said.
AA's public affairs manager, Mr Conor Faughnan, concurred with this view, describing the existing system of fines as an inadequate deterrent.
"From our discussions with gardaí, the one type of offender which exasperates them is the male business driver. According to anecdotal evidence, they are collecting multiple fines in a single day and then getting their companies to pay them off on their behalf.
"We are talking about someone who drives from Dublin to Cork in 2½ hours in flagrant violation of the regulations.
"He could pick up two or three fines on each journey but he doesn't care because the sums involved are relatively small."
Other offenders, he said, who would quickly fall foul of the penalty points scheme included "the frequently sloppy driver who never does one major thing wrong but does enough consistent wrongs to warrant being put off the road for a while".
As the scheme was rolled out, he added, "the other person who will have to change is the parent who fails to use seat-belts in the back for children".
UK research into the profile of speeding drivers bears out the claim that men are more likely to offend.
A study by the Scottish Office Central Research Unit in 1996 found male drivers were twice as likely as females to commit a minor speeding offence, and four times more likely to commit a serious one.
Placing men in the 21-29-year-old age bracket at the highest risk of speeding, the study found drivers became less likely to speed as they got older. Non-manual workers and those with high-mileage occupations were more prone to speeding.
The study also found that most speeding offences were recorded on roads in built-up areas with 30 m.p.h. speed limits.