The regulatory voral on speed cameras open by the Cassation could cost the Municipalities 40 million euros. To support it is Codacons, who made the accounts of the sentence with which the Supreme Court reiterated how the penalties are not valid if the device that detected the excess of speed is not approved: a circumstance that would concern all speed detectors in Italy, for the lack of a specific implementation decree for 33 years.
To run for cover, the Minister of Transport Matteo Salvini asked the Association of Italian Municipalities Anches a detailed census of devices scattered throughout the country, but according to the consumer association tens of millions of euros in fines would already be at risk of disabling, with repercussions on the coffers of local administrations.
The chaos speed camera
The chaos on the speed cameras exploded with a judgment of April 2024 of the Cassation, in which the judges established the need for an approval decree to make the sanctions for excess speed legitimate, reaffirming the principle in different rulings with which they accepted the appeals of motorists.
The regulatory vacuum was born from article 142 of the highway code, which in 1992 established how speed detectors should be approved and duly approved. The implementing decree to establish the rules for approval never came and for years the administrators have given good the procedure together with the go -ahead of the devices.
Until last year, when the Supreme Court sparked the cards, specifying that these are two different validations.
The decree frozen by Salvini
Transport minister Matteo Salvini had tried to put a patch on the legal blanket with a decree in which they considered themselves all the speed cameras approved after 2017turning off the older ones pending regulation. A amnesty approved and sent to Brussels, only to be blocked for the need for “insights”.
Further checks that the MIT has requested the association of municipalities, discovering from the data delivered by the ANCI at the end of April that in Italy only the 40.6% of fixed detectors only 32.8%have been approved after 2017 and among the mobile ones.
A picture that the dicastery did not consider sufficient to trace a new regulatory basis, soliciting the mayors to provide “not a percentage, but a clear and unequivocal number“.
Codacons accounts
Waiting for the regulatory machine to find a solution to the chaos speed camera, the appeals of motorists increase more and more and the municipalities are forced to extinguish the detectors.
The consequence is that, according to Codacons’ calculations, “only in large cities over 40 million euros of high sanctions through speed cameras are at risk “.
“Only in the main 20 Italian cities did the speed camera sanctions guaranteed in 2023 (last available data) overall collections of over 65 million euros, but the ruling of the Cassation that declared outlaw the approved but not approved appliances is likely to represent a scoring of abnormal proportions” explained the consumer association.
