On the Internet you can find an interesting fact about the Scandinavian country: the money collected through speeding fines forms a lottery prize fund for drivers who comply with the speed limit. We have verified the accuracy of such messages.
Faktrum website in the collection “10 interesting facts about Sweden” reports: “In Stockholm, traffic cameras record drivers who comply with the speed limit, and they are automatically entered into a lottery, the prize fund of which is formed from fines paid by drivers who exceed the speed limit.” Popular public pages on VKontakte with an audience of several hundred thousand to several million subscribers also talked about the unusual initiative. Among them - "5 interesting facts", "Useful education", "Did you know?", performance and many others. Similar posts can be found on other social networks, for example Facebook And Twitter.
The idea of holding such a lottery suggested American Kevin Richardson. With this concept, he won a competition for “fun” theories to change driver behavior. The competition was organized by Volkswagen at the beginning of 2010.
In the autumn of the same year, they tried to implement the project in Stockholm together with the Swedish National Association for the Promotion of Road Safety (NTF). On one of the streets of the Swedish capital, a camera was installed that recorded the speed of cars. Over the three days that the experiment lasted, 25,000 cars took part in it. Before the lottery, the average speed at the location where the camera was installed was 32 km/h, after which it dropped to 25 km/h.
By messages local media, the winner of the lottery was local resident Bengt Holmström, who won 20,000 crowns (almost $3,000 according to course 2010). Four more people won Prizes are half the size. In 2011, the lottery held in five more Swedish cities.
Our fellow fact-checkers at the Australian Associated Press contacted for comment to Ian Sandberg, head of NTF in 2010. He emphasized that the experiment, funded by Volkswagen, never grew into a nationwide practice, without receiving support from the state. Sandberg also explained that, contrary to the original idea, the funds collected through speeding fines did not become the basis of the lottery prize fund. Since the beginning of the 2010s, according to the former head of the NTF and the author of the idea, Richardson, it has not been carried out. A representative of the Swedish Transport Agency in a conversation with Australian fact checkers and completely stated, that he had never heard of the lottery and “strongly doubts” its existence.
Thus, a number of Internet resources, public pages and individual social network users mislead their readers and subscribers. The initiative they describe was implemented in Sweden more than ten years ago as a short-term experiment using just one camera. The project was not scaled to the whole of Stockholm, much less to the whole of Sweden. The idea could not be fully realized, so talking about it the way the authors of texts about a lottery among drivers does is groundless.
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