Where were 61,631 speeding detections? Published figures leave most without a named road

More than 61,000 mobile speed-camera detections in Northern Ireland cannot be assigned to a named road from the published annual route table, leaving most of the year's recorded offences outside the rankings available to the public.

The PSNI's 2025 mobile-camera total is 86,628. Of those, 61,631 appear under one combined heading: Community Concern Site. That is approximately 71% of the detections from mobile cameras. The 72 individually named reporting-route rows account for the remaining 24,997.

It is an extraordinary imbalance in the public breakdown of a major road-safety programme. A reader can find an annual total for Shore Road or the A1 and examine month-by-month movements. But the majority of mobile-camera detections sit together in a category too broad to reveal which communities or roads generated them.

The issue is not whether the offences were real. The annual table reports them. Nor is there evidence that their locations are unknown to police. The problem is that the public-facing road-level comparison does not distribute that 61,631 figure among named locations.

For a scheme with a prevention objective, the omission matters. Residents can see where reported enforcement roads are listed, but they cannot use this table to discover which community-concern sites accounted for the largest volumes of detections, or whether those numbers rose or fell locally. A ranking of named roads is necessarily incomplete when most detections are pooled outside it.

What the visible rankings can and cannot show

The leading named reporting route in 2025 was Shore Road, Eden to Belfast, with 3,482 detections. Sprucefield roundabout to Sheepbridge on the A1 recorded 2,018, while the A2 Belfast-to-Bangor route recorded 1,891. These are meaningful reported counts for those specific categories. Yet they account for only a small portion of the full mobile-camera total.

It follows that being first in the named-route table is not the same as being the site of the most speeding detections in Northern Ireland. The aggregate Community Concern Site category is larger than all the named-road entries combined. There is no basis in the published breakdown for placing every site in one comprehensive league table.

PureCar's separate enforcement directory includes 344 published mobile enforcement and community concern location records. That is useful geographical information. It does not, however, link the combined 61,631 detections to each of those locations. The directory is a list of published sites, not proof that all were used in 2025 or a tally of offences detected at each one.

This distinction has practical consequences for communities that have asked for speed enforcement. A residents' group might welcome a mobile van on a road where speeding has been a persistent complaint. Without site-specific figures, however, it cannot use the national annual table to assess the number of detections associated with that location, much less evaluate what happened to traffic speeds or injury collisions following enforcement.

The named routes themselves also cover more than one position in some cases. A line in a spreadsheet identifying a stretch of road is not necessarily an exact camera location. Even the remaining 24,997 detections therefore provide a reporting-route breakdown rather than a precise record of every enforcement position.

The enforcement question left unanswered

Northern Ireland recorded 8,062 mobile-camera van deployments in 2025, up from 8,017 in 2024. Mobile detections increased by 4,330 over the same period. Those annual numbers say something about the scale of the programme, but not how its time and activity were distributed across local communities.

A useful public breakdown would identify each applicable site or consistently defined route, the period of enforcement, deployment hours and the number of recorded detections. It would also distinguish community-requested locations from other routes. That would permit meaningful comparison from one year to the next and provide a basis for asking whether enforcement was concentrated where recorded collisions or speeding concerns justified it.

There may be operational, administrative or privacy considerations affecting what police can publish. This investigation has not obtained a PSNI explanation for the decision to aggregate the category, and none should be invented. But an unexplained aggregate of this size is a legitimate matter for scrutiny, especially when road-by-road figures are routinely used to suggest which areas have the largest speeding problem.

There is an equally important distinction between detections and penalties. The 61,631 figure is not the number of motorists convicted or the number who paid a fixed penalty. Some detections result in courses or other outcomes. And a location with many detections may be one with more enforcement, heavier traffic or both — not necessarily the worst rate of speeding.

Those qualifications make more detailed information necessary, not less. Without it, a prominent headline about the region's busiest named enforcement route can conceal the far larger body of detections grouped elsewhere in the publication.

The question for the PSNI is straightforward: how much of the Community Concern Site total can be published at a consistent road or site level, and what prevents the remainder from being reported in a way that local people can understand? Until that is answered, Northern Ireland has a precise mobile-camera total but an incomplete public account of where most of those detections were recorded.