The 24-hour crackdown will start at 6 am Wednesday, with speed checks set up at 4,000 sites, the interior ministers of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony announced at a press conference in Münster on Monday.
“Speeding doesn’t stop at state borders,” said Ralf Jäger, interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia and a Social Democrat (SPD). “Travelling at high speeds is the killer number one everywhere.”
The interior ministers and Dutch officials said the offensive was to combat the sharp rise in the number of traffic deaths seen last year, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) reported on Monday.
Dutch traffic police chief Fokko Klok praised the collaboration, saying it would lead to fewer deaths, NDR reported. Drivers have been under stricter surveillance in the Netherlands since September, when the top speed limit was raised from 120 to 130 kilometres per hour.
In Lower Saxony, the number of traffic deaths rose from 479 in 2010, to 540 last year, the broadcaster reported.
More than a million drivers were checked during two so-called “Blitz Marathons” this year in North Rhine-Westphalia. The operation caught 39,000 speeders - even though the control points were announced in advance.
State officials credit the campaigns with the decrease in traffic deaths over the first nine months of 2012. The number of traffic deaths decreased by 15.4 percent over the year before during that timeframe NDR reported.
DAPD/The Local/mbw
Comments