Five hours of enforcement, from 4pm to 9pm, across the entire country. Result: 115 drivers sanctioned for illegal overtaking. Plus another 224 traffic violations recorded in that same five-hour window. That is three hundred and thirty-nine offences in a single afternoon.

The regional breakdown is the part worth reading closely. The most sanctions - 35 - fell in the Tetovo police region. Right behind it is Ohrid with 34, and Bitola with 19. So nearly two thirds of all overtaking fines in the whole country were collected in three areas.

The wider picture from the previous two days is even more telling. On 10 and 11 August police issued 1,322 payment orders. Of those, 400 were for inappropriate speed. Thirty-two people were detained for reckless driving: three for driving under the influence of alcohol, 15 for driving without a licence, one because of a previously imposed driving ban. Thirteen vehicles were seized under article 300-b of the criminal code.

The list goes on: 302 violations for illegal parking, 16 sanctions for drink-driving, 106 motorcyclists without a helmet, 67 road users without a seatbelt. Eight vehicles were pulled off the road for being unregistered, two for being technically unfit, five drivers fined for tinted windows.

What the numbers we do not have are saying

The interior ministry announces the catch - and fair enough. What is missing is the other column: how many of these 1,322 orders will be collected, and how many will expire in a drawer somewhere. Because the driver pulled over in Tetovo yesterday knows the answer better than any road-safety campaign does. If a fine has a realistic chance of never being collected, it is not a penalty - it is paperwork.

One hundred and six motorcyclists without helmets in two days is not a statistic about road safety. It is a statistic about how seriously enforcement is taken when there is none in sight. The checks, the ministry says, continue in the coming days. The question is what happens to those same roads on the days they do not.