POLICE in Rome have a new weapon in their quest to tame reckless drivers: a device to identify and fine people who ignore the double white lines that prohibit overtaking.

It comprises three video cameras coupled to sensors under the road surface. When the sensors detect a car crossing the white lines, the cameras catch the number plate. Traffic police then check the film to make sure that an offence has been committed and start an automatic process to fine the car’s owner €70 (£46) and impose three licence points.

The sorpasso-metro has been set up on a key section of the 20-mile Via del Mare, which takes Romans to the beach resort of Ostia. In the summer the road is frequently congested and drivers are tempted to nip across the white lines into the opposite carriageway to get past a dawdling Fiat 500. The result is the winding road has one of the highest accident rates in Italy. Police surveys show that at least 5,000 dangerous overtaking manoeuvres take place on the road every month. But in the first five months of the year overworked traffic police were able to hand out only 35 fines for the offence. That is about to change.

Enrico Gasbarra, the provincial president, said: “There is no intention to persecute motorists. We just want to stop one of the most dangerous driving offences, one which causes head-on collisions and many deaths.”

According to the most recent EU statistics, Italy’s annual road death toll is the second highest in Europe after Germany, which has a population half as big again. Rome had 362 road deaths in 2002.

Nationally things have improved slightly since the Government introduced a penalty-point system for driving licences in 2003, making drivers a little more cautious. Before then dangerous driving was punished exclusively with fines and, occasionally, by licence withdrawal.

The Rome province is the first in Italy to put the sorpasso-metro officially into action, although the system is being tested on 30 other roads. Road safety officials said that the devices would soon be installed elsewhere on the Via del Mare and and on other key Rome traffic arteries. Their presence will be indicated by road signs.

The new apparatus angered some local politicians. Fabio Sabbatani Schiuma, deputy president of Rome’s municipal assembly, said: “We’ll have to see whether this is really to be used as a deterrent or as the umpteenth excuse for fining people.” What was needed, he added, was a completely new stretch of road so that traffic going in opposite directions would never come into contact.