Gardaí have announced that starting on Tuesday, July 26th, 61 more new speed cameras will be in operation.
With this addition, there will be 1,373 cameras in use nationwide.
The announcement comes as in 2022, there have been 89 road deaths an increase of 28 over 2021 and 13 to date in 2019.
According to a statement from Garda, the main goal of safety cameras is to diminish collisions caused by speed, lessen injuries, and save lives.
They said that safety cameras are used in speed enforcement zones, which are places where there has been a pattern of collisions caused by driving too fast.
Since the installation of safety cameras, more than 2.2 million speeding penalties have been issued.
Speaking about the news, Superintendent Thomas Murphy, Garda National Roads Policing Bureau said: “When someone decides to speed they put themselves and members of their community at risk, particularly children, older people, cyclists, and other motorists.
“Our priority is to ensure that the vast majority of people who use the roads responsibly are not put in danger by a minority of reckless drivers who continue to drive at excessive speed.”
He said the deployment of safety cameras has been proven to save lives and is calling on every road user to play their part to make the roads safer for all.
“Since 2010, An Garda Síochána has contributed to making our roads safer through the use of safety cameras, using a service provider ‘GoSafe’ to operate them on its behalf. The cameras are operated using a fleet of marked vehicles.
“Road deaths have decreased from 415 in 2000 to 137 in 2021. This shows a dramatic reduction in terms of risk and a huge increase in terms of road safety,” he said.
Mr. Murphy said speed camera zones are identified high-risk locations and can include school safety zones, community engagement request zones and road works safety zones.
Based on the most recent available collision statistics, An Garda Sochána claimed they had finished an updated collision study of the road network.
New locations for cameras were selected following an analysis of the data acquired from fatal, serious and minor road traffic collisions and from further consideration given to locations of concern highlighted by local communities.
The new zones are spread across 23 counties, 49 per cent on Regional Routes, 31 per cent National Routes and 20 per cent on other routes.