The Government delegate in the Canary Islands, Anselmo Pestana, and the provincial head of the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) of the Ministry of the Interior in Las Palmas, Eva Canitrot, have reported today in Gran Canaria on the specific control campaign carried out by the DGT for overspeed surveillance as one of the key risk factors in road accidents.
The campaign, which takes place throughout the country from this Monday to next Sunday and which has been coordinated at European level by the RoadPol association, is part of the Global Plan of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030 and the Spanish Strategy for Road Safety 2030, which seek to reduce by half the number of fatalities by the end of the decade.
The agents of the Traffic Group of the Civil Guard, as well as the other local police who join it, will monitor both on urban and interurban roads the risk sections associated with speed, as well as those points where the circulation exceeds the established limit and there is a high accident rate, all following the recommendations of international and European organizations that urge the agencies responsible for road safety in the different countries to monitor that the established speed limits are met.
Considering its preventive nature, through this campaign, which seeks to focus on the fact that inadequate speed is the third most common concurrent factor in traffic accidents, drivers will be announced the existence of controls through circumstantial vertical signage.
“Approximately 30% of fatal road accidents are caused by excessive or inadequate speed. And in Spain this is a concurrent factor present in more than 20% of fatal accidents. This is a reality from which the Government of Spain cannot be abstracted and against which it continues to work to prevent not only deaths, but also wounded people,” says Anselmo Pestana.
“Thanks to the Traffic Group of the Civil Guard we put the focus on the roads, but also thanks to the collaboration of the Local Police we monitor the excess of speed on urban roads. We have to take into account that from 80 kilometers per hour it is practically impossible for a pedestrian to survive a traffic jam, while at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour the risk of death of the pedestrian is reduced to 5%,” he adds.
New speed control points
In addition to these periodic campaigns, the General Directorate of Traffic of the Ministry of the Interior uses other speed control tools such as mobile radars, aerial control from helicopters or fixed radars, of which, within the plan of installation of 122 new points in 2025 in Spain, two have begun to operate in recent weeks in the Canary Islands.
These are the fixed radars of the TF-2, at kilometer point 1, and the TF-652, at kilometer point 2, both on the island of Tenerife, control points that, as usual, are signposted on the road, published on the DGT website and their locations made available to operators to include them in their browsers.
During the first month of operation, drivers traveling at a speed higher than that allowed by the roads where these new radars are located will receive an informative letter warning them that they have been caught by a radar for overspeed. After the time, the driver who exceeds the speed will be punished and will receive a fine.
Recognition by drivers
It is estimated that 10-15% of all accidents and 30% of fatal accidents are the direct result of over-speed or inadequate according to the Thematic Report on Road Safety on Speed published by the European Road Safety Observatory in 2021.
In that report, the prevalence of speeding by European drivers was highlighted, according to studies by the European Survey Research Association (ESRA), in its Electronic Survey on the Attitudes of Road Users.
In this regard, 56.3% of European drivers acknowledged having deliberately driven faster than the speed limit in urbanised areas at least once in the month prior to the survey.
In the case of Spanish drivers, around 60% recognised driving above speed limits on conventional roads, almost 50% in urban areas and more than 60% on motorways and motorways.
In the last speed control campaign held in April, agents of the Traffic Group of the Civil Guard (ATGC) controlled a total of 1,163,126 vehicles throughout the country and 75,028 complaints were filed, while in the Canary Islands the ATGC controlled 120,280 vehicles and 6,213 were reported.