Speeding motorists face the prospect of playing Russian roulette - Irish style - in the coming weeks when the Garda launches its new unmanned speed cameras.
Twenty permanent speed camera boxes have been mounted along national routes in Dublin, Meath and Louth and appear to be working. To the public all will appear to be working, but just three will contain real cameras.
The National Roads Authority confirmed yesterday it had invested £500,000 in the speed detection scheme and had paid for two of the three cameras which will be regularly moved by gardai from one location to the next.
A light on each of the mounted camera boxes will flash when a passing motorist is breaking the speed limit. However, motorists will have to wait up to 14 days for the £50 fine to drop through their letter boxes before they knows if the box contained a camera.
NRA officials are completing tests with the Dutch makers of the cameras and are satisfied the equipment provides adequate photographs of the number plates of speeding vehicles. The cameras are expected to be handed over to the Garda within weeks.
The fine will be posted to the legal owner of the vehicle who will then be obliged to inform gardai who was driving the vehicle at the time, according to Insp. Brendan Mangan of the Garda National Traffic Bureau.
The grey-painted camera boxes have been mounted on poles along stretches of the N1 and M1 roads between Dublin and Dundalk, the N2 between Ashbourne and Slane, the N3 between Dunshaughlin and Navan, and the M50 around Dublin.
The system is similar to that in operation on British motorways. Even before the launch of the system, the presence of the camera boxes on the roadsides in recent weeks had acted as a deterrent to speeding, Insp. Mangan said.
Preliminary figures from the NRA's national survey on speeds last year found that the average car speed on the national primary two-lane road sections was 61 m.p.h. - up 3 m.p.h. since 1991. "Up to 20 per cent of cars and a greater percentage of larger vehicles were breaking the speed limit," the NRA head of corporate affairs, Mr Michael Egan, said.
The investment in speed cameras was part of a larger programme of expenditure by the NRA last year to improve road safety. This included over £2.4 million on traffic-calming measures, £1.6 million on low-cost accident remedial measures and £800,000 on roadside ice detection units.
The NRA is working to cut road deaths between 1997 and 2002 by 20 per cent. Last year 415 people died on the roads, 12 per cent down on 1997.