Road safety chief: Speed cameras are worthless
Chairperson of the Israel NRSA Giora Romm recommends that the digital speed cameras currently used on Israel's roads should be scrapped, as they have failed to prevent accidents.
Chairperson of the Israel National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) Giora Romm made a recommendation for the nation’s police to shut use speed cameras in a different way.
According to Romm, the digital speed cameras have proven to be unsuccessful in preventing traffic accidents, even after receiving an investment of more than NIS 100 million, and thus should be shut down immediately.
Romm’s recommendation, which he made to head of the Israel Police Traffic Department Police Major General Yaron Be’eri, caused a stir among the ranks of the police, which still places its faith in the project despite criticism in a report by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira.
Romm, a former IDF Major General and highly respected pilot, was recently appointed to chair the NRSA by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who has expressed his desire to see the authority reinvigorated. The appointment came about following Romm’s success in rebuilding Israel’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Romm cited Shapira’s report as evidence of a long line of problems, which indicate that the project came about without much thought. The speed camera project was started late in the last decade following extensive preparations – but devoid of research. While the authority was supposed to conduct such research, the budget was never allocated for its implementation.
The Israel Police placed over 100 speed cameras across Israel, some of which were installed in urban junctions and were also programmed to monitor whether drivers ran red lights. Romm, who sent copies of his recommendation to Minister Katz, Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan, Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh, and Knesset Economy Committee Chairperson MK Eitan Cabel, reminded his readers that State Comptroller Shapira’s report said the speed camera project has ceased to be operationally viable.
“Beyond the issue of its management across the years, which the comptroller examined, every car in Israel today has one of a wide number of systems that notify (the driver) about approaching a speed camera. This is one of the only cases in nature in which the animal knows about the hunter before the hunter knows about it,” he writes.
Romm says that he is not opposed to enforcing the speed limit, but that he would like to focus efforts on reducing accidents rather than increasing the number of speeding tickets. He therefore suggested measuring drivers’ average speed across a wider breadth of the, as opposed to merely measuring their speed at a single point.
“A project that relies on advanced camera technology has a place in the grand scheme of traffic law enforcement in Israel. It needs to be a project, the goal of which would be to reduce the average driving speed in specific sections of the road. This is a technique that is well known in the wider world and is already operational in different countries,” Romm coninued.
He went on to say, “Instead of a system that, in many civilians’ opinions, is mainly meant to charge drivers money and transfer it to the state treasury, Israel will switch to a system that will – with proper implementation – reduce the average driving speed and will make an important contribution to increasing safety."
Officials from the Israel Police stated that they are now studying the letter sent by Romm.
