SPEED BEHAVIOUR MONITORING IN ESTONIA

The Estonian road safety has improved, but it still remains relatively dangerous if comparing with Nordic countries. Motorization and road safety development in Estonia has put rather challenging goals for safety improvement in the National Road Safety programme. It declares that the number of fatalities should drop from 204 (in 2000) to 100 (in 2010). One of the most important measures of road safety development is a speeding control and speed limit acceptance. There has been a hard political pressure on raising the speed limits, but it certainly does not follow the road users attitudes. Studies show that the ordinary road users look on speeding as one of the most dangerous aspects on road safety and the road users pressure on speed rising is not so heavy as it is normally understood. We have started a permanent speed-monitoring program in Estonia, where we can get a speeding data from permanent and temporary speed monitoring stations. Due to these data we can say that approximately 40% exceed the speed limit, 20% of the drivers exceed the speed limit by 10 kph, the proportion that exceed the limit by more than 20% is 5%. The paper gives comprehensive information about the speed characteristics on Estonian roads as well as results of people's attitude study towards the road safety measure, including the speeding and speed limits. The comparison of speeding behaviour in Estonia and Finland is given. To guarantee the speeding control national Road Administration has used also some rather original measures, like the usage of phantom police cars (made of paper) on roads. The effect of Police Speed Enforcement, including the phantom policemen is presented in the paper. For the covering abstract see ITRD E123193.