Speed cameras: Italy collected €1.5 billion in one year

In some Italian cities, the fines, when compared with the number of inhabitants, reached amounts of more than €100 per person per year.

The worst is Florence where the total fines for motoring offences came to almost €200 per person per year as many tourists were caught up in the speeding fine explosion. A boom that in 2023 marks a growth of 6.4 percent over the previous year and over 20 per cent over 2019.

These are not fines for parking offences but speed cameras. It was a few weeks ago that a statistic compiled by Codacons on data from the Ministry of the Interior showed Italy in the lead in Europe for the number of speed cameras on its the roads: over 11 million devices compared to Britain’s 7,700, Germany’s 4,700, and France’s 3,780.

Calculating the impact was Il Sole 24 Ore, which reworked data from the Ministry of Economy’s telematics system. The geographical split sees the North and Centre of the country in the lead and it is clear that fines are growing rapidly in smaller municipalities. Those that do not have more than 10,000 inhabitants collected €238.6 million in fines in 2023

In one small town, Colle Santa Lucia, which from the Giau Pass in the Ampezzo Dolomites has collected €747,000 (over €2,000 for each of its 346 inhabitants), although of course it is usually passing tourists who pay.

And in Rome, there is one speed camera near to the Giovanni XXIII Gallery, which has caught 154,000 drivers just the one camera, compared to 107,000 recorded by all the other city speed cameras put together. It should be noted however, that there has also been a marked reduction in traffic accidents at that particular black spot.