An announcement that will cause a stir. Small speeding will no longer be penalized by a withdrawal of points from January 1, 2024, announced the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, in a letter to Senator LR du Var, Françoise Dumont, dated April 11 .
“Work has been undertaken at my request to adapt the repressive regime applicable to minor speeding violations”, those “less than 5 km/h”, explains the minister to the senator in this letter revealed by the regional daily Nice- Morning and authenticated by Agence France-Presse with the elected official. But “it will not be a question of decriminalizing these offenses, which will remain punishable by a fine”, adds Gérald Darmanin in this text.
In 2020, of the 12.5 million tickets issued for speeding checked by speed cameras, 58% were for speeding less than 5 km/h, according to a response from the Ministry of the Interior in April 2022 to a written question by Francoise Dumont. “We have been working on this measure with the Ministry of the Interior for years, so I can only welcome it”, assures Pierre Chasseray, general delegate of 40 million motorists.
“This will show that it will have no effect on accidentality,” he anticipates. “The second step now is to obtain the non-financial penalty, because there is still the fine to pay,” he added. Today, speeding less than 20 km/h is punished with one point and a fine of 68 euros (on roads where the maximum authorized speed is greater than 50 km/h) or 135 euros.
This measure will come into force five and a half years after the lowering, in July 2018, of 90 to 80 km/h of the maximum speed, on secondary two-way roads without a central separator. This decision, which aimed to reduce speed on the axes where fatal accidents are concentrated, was followed by strong protests, in particular from the Yellow Vests. A total of 3,260 people died on the roads of mainland France in 2022, a balance sheet at a stable level (0.5%) compared to 2019, the last reference year before the pandemic.
