A fleet of 223 radar cars entrusted to private companies and using an infrared flash not visible to users, will be in service in eight regions by the end of 2021 to track speeding violations, said Road Safety.
To read also: Five questions on the "private radar cars" which survey the French roads
Scheduled by an interministerial road safety committee in 2015, the testing of these cars began in April 2018 in the Eure region and at the beginning of January concerned 83 vehicles in four regions: Normandy, Brittany, Pays-de-la-Loire and Center -Loire valley. The system will be gradually extended to the rest of France. The radar vehicles, for the most part of the sedan type, are unmarked, equipped with cameras placed on the front and rear decks in order to detect automatically and while they are inserted in traffic, speeding, without visible flash. They only circulate with a driver on board, while in those of the police, one official drives while the other raises the maximum authorized speed. "
At the end of 2021, the fleet of externally driven radar cars will then be 223. It will be supplied by the conversion of vehicles currently driven by police or gendarmes,
”said Road Safety in a press release Wednesday evening.
Operational controls in the second half of 2021
In the morning,
Le Parisien
had indicated that radar vehicles will "
become widespread throughout France, with 450 cars in all by 2023
". Authorities have not confirmed this figure. They also indicate that four new regions are affected by the experiment, with “
operational
controls
during the second half of 2021
”: Grand-Est, Hauts-de-France, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Nouvelle-Aquitaine. For the time being, Mobiom, Securitas, OTI France and GSR are the companies selected through a call for tenders, each in charge of two regions, the delegation attached to the Ministry of the Interior told AFP.
The objective of the device is to "
free up time for the police
" and "
to enforce the speed limits
". For Chantal Perrichon, president of the League against road violence, "
it is urgent, if we want to improve road safety in our country, to generalize throughout the national territory the deployment of these unmarked cars and stop doing experiments
”. On the other hand, Pierre Chasseray, general delegate of 40 million motorists considers that “
these radars are useless
” because the drivers cannot stop the offenders. "
The bias of road safety is to say that people in excess of speed, in the end, it is not dangerous because they agree to photograph them without flash, but they continue to let them roll
”, denounces he does.