THE NEW speed detection radars installed around Lisbon, which are clocking up a record 2,500 speeding tickets daily, may prove fruitless because the police and local authorities do not have the means in place to collect the fines.
According to Lisbon Câmara and the police, the recently created National Road Security Authority (Autoridade Nacional de Segurança Rodoviária), resulting from the extinction of the Direcção-Geral de Viação (DGV), simply hasn’t got the manpower or equipment to process the quantity of fines being generated.
In other words, the system is so slow and bureaucratic that many people caught on camera for speeding will get away Scot free.
Rafael Madeira da Silva, a lawyer who specialises in traffic fines and cases, and is co-author of Highway Code Infractions (Infracções ao Código da Estrada), said: “They should have thought seriously about this before setting up these sophisticated systems because the current DGV services are not going to be able to process the fines within the timeframe stipulated by the law.
“Now they are going to be literally snowed under with fines to process, with the success of these new speed traps, without an effective system in place to deal with them,” he concluded.
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