At this year’s speed camera marathon, Germany is a patchwork quilt. Only five federal states are taking part in both the action week against excessive speed starting on Monday and the focus day next Friday, April 19th, with particularly intensive controls, as a survey by the German Press Agency among interior authorities and state police showed. Six other federal states only take part in one of the two campaigns, five in neither.
Specifically, Berlin, Bremen, Lower Saxony, Saarland and Saxony are not participating. Thuringia, Bavaria and Brandenburg are only taking part in the speed camera marathon on April 19th, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein are only taking part in the so-called Speedweek without a highlight on Friday – although Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is even organizing a whole month of action. Only Saxony-Anhalt, Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Hamburg and Baden-Württemberg run the full program.
Controversial controls
With the campaign, which is also taking place in other European countries, the police want to draw attention to the problem of excessive speed on the one hand and, on the other hand, to put pressure on speeders through additional checks.
But although there is agreement that speeders pose great dangers – excessive speed is one of the most common causes of accidents – the actions are not without controversy, as the very different levels of participation in the individual federal states show. In Berlin, for example, people argue that the effects of previous actions were hardly measurable and were limited to the days of action. It is therefore better to rely on control pressure all year round. It sounds similar in Saarland, for example.
ADAC: “Contribution to road safety”
Proponents, on the other hand, rely on the attention generated by the campaign and the educational effect of the controls on speeders. Even the ADAC traffic club is positive: campaigns such as the speed camera marathon “make a contribution to road safety because they make road users aware of the dangers of driving too fast and can raise their awareness accordingly,” it says.
Michael Mertens from the police union also expressed himself rather positively. The effort is entirely justified, he says. If the topic is discussed on the day of the speed camera marathon and it comes to people’s minds, then it is a good day for road safety. However, you shouldn’t use all the resources on this one day, because more controls are actually needed throughout the year. If road users knew that they wouldn’t get caught, discipline would suffer.
If you don’t want to get caught, you should pay particular attention to your speed in the new week. In individual countries such as Bavaria, most of the speed cameras that will be set up at the marathon on Friday are announced in advance.
