Top 10 Speeding Hotspots Uncovered by Britain's Police

Freedom of Information requests have become the new way of finding out pertinent information from police forces about driving habits in the UK. A recent data haul which took into account speeding tickets issued between January 2021 and 2023, has revealed that West Yorkshire is Britain's speeding hotspot.

Streets Ahead

Excuse the pun, but West Yorkshire was streets ahead of every other forced area when it came to speeding tickets being issued. In the two years of data collected, 224,160 speeding tickets were issued to Motor Ace in West Yorkshire. In second place was Avon and Somerset, where the number was almost half at 173,426. In third place, Thames Valley police reported 151,501 speeding tickets issued, and in fourth place, the West Midlands force say that they issued 95,093 speeding tickets in the same period.

Not the Full Story

However, there are 44 police forces in the United Kingdom, and only 23 responded to this freedom of information request, so a full picture has not been obtained. The survey showed that in fifth place for speeding tickets issued, Surrey force gave out 87,270. In sixth place, Bedfordshire police issued 69,818, and South Yorkshire police were in seventh place with 67,255 tickets. In eighth, ninth and 10th place were Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and Herefordshire, with 62,514, 59,525, and 53,627, speeding tickets issued, respectively.

Road Safety

Of course, the most concerning issue with speeding is the death and serious injury rate on the roads in Britain, with an accident occurring every 16 minutes. The requests were made to the police forces by vehicle mitigation system, operator Herald, and they wanted the information to try and highlight just how dangerous speeding can be and how severe the consequences are. In 2022, 1608 people died in a road traffic accident, and over 26,701 were seriously injured. Brake, a UK road safety charity, says that this equates to 84 people being seriously injured and five deaths on the roads each day. According to the metropolitan police, speeding directly contributed to 19% of deaths. A further 25% of deaths on the road can be directly attributed to exceeding the speed limit or travelling too fast.

There was a significant increase in 2021 as compared to 2020. However, we have to take into account the coronavirus pandemic, with so many more people being restricted to their local area and not travelling on roads as much. Sadly, though, this does not translate to a significant decrease in the number of injuries and deaths, which have not changed for the better since 2012. The police forces who requested the lowest amount of speeding tickets in the period were south Wales, with 4455, Sussex, with 3071, Wiltshire was 2059, Merseyside, with 2035 and Durham, with just a mere 693 speeding tickets issued. It seems that if you want to safest roads in the United Kingdom, Durham is the place to head.

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