18/7 Tass 174
MOSCOW, July 18 (Itar-Tass) —— The Moscow city authorities will install 800 cameras by 2014 for automatic registration of traffic violations on the road.
The cameras will not only register traffic violations but also monitor the situation in the streets online and watch out for law offences.
Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev said on Monday, July 18, that such systems have proved effective and will be actively used in the city.
“This work will proceed in three stages. We plan to install 150 photo and video cameras in the city this year. They will monitor 600 places, with all information to be stored and archived. Twenty-six such systems have already been installed,” he said.
The number of cameras will be increased to 400 next year and to 800 by 2014 to cover almost 2,400 places.
More than 20 million roubles will be invested in the purchase and installation of video cameras in Moscow traffic police patrol cars in 2011.
“Video systems will help to fight corruption, and recordings from cameras will help to resolve any dispute between a traffic inspector and a car owner,” Kolokoltsev said earlier.
“Video systems installed in patrol cars can record several images at once – what is happening in front of the car, behind it and inside the car. There is also the night recording regime,” he said.
More than 1,800 patrol cars will be provided with video cameras.
“We will issue an order shortly that will require inspectors to communicate with car owners in front of the camera. If he does not do so, this will be considered as a signal for his disqualification,” Kolokoltsev said.
Video cameras will also be installed on all of Moscow’s roads within two years, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said earlier.
Video cameras in Moscow registered dozens of thousands of traffic rules violations in 2008, 2009 and 2010, allowing police to impose millions of roubles worth of fines on defaulting drivers.
Video cameras in the Moscow region are installed mainly in the places where a large number of accidents occur. “Not even one road accident was registered in those places after the installation of the video cameras,” region traffic police chief Sergei Sergeyev said earlier.
Russian authorities plan provided 167 million roubles for video monitoring on the roads in 2009.
The money was used to buy equipment and create a single video data processing centre, Sergeyev said.
Over a thousand video cameras have been installed on the roads. “Five cities in the Moscow region – Zhukovsky, Zheleznodorozhny, Krasnogorsk, Dubna, and Mytishchi – are fully covered by video monitoring systems. Similar systems will also be installed in other cities,” Sergeyev said.
He said the video monitoring systems had proved effective. “The number of road accidents in areas where video cameras are installed has decreased and people drive slower and observe the rules in these places. For example, the number of violations on Dmitrovskoye Shosse has decreased by 20 percent and no accidents have been registered although they happened there frequently before,” the official said.
“This is the result we expected. The main task today is not to punish the driver for a violation but to prevent a violation and a possible accident. So the cameras are a very important preventive tool,” he said.
“We intend to continue using video cameras actively in order to monitor the situation on the roads,” Sergeyev said, adding that in the future video cameras would also register not only overspeeding but also such offences as movement against the red light, movement on the wrong side of the road, overtaking in the wrong place, and other offences.
Since July 1, 2008, traffic rules violations recoded by video cameras installed on major roads have been regarded as official proof of offence.
“This requires the creation of an automatic system to oversee compliance with the traffic rules, which should be integrated with the car registration system and the databanks containing information about the issued driver’s licenses and penalised drivers, as well as the penalty administration system,” Russia’s former chief traffic inspector Viktor Kiryanov said.
“A concept for the new system has already been developed,” he added.
Kiryanov said work was proceeding in parallel to provide traffic police with necessary equipment, but “the pace of this work needs to be stepped up”.
He said the installation of video cameras on the roads would help improve the situation considerably and reduce the number of road accidents. “The system is not operating at full capacity yet… However the first results indicate that they are effective as a preventive method,” he said.
“The main principle was that no one hid the cameras. On the contrary, special road signs were installed to alert the drivers to the video cameras. Our task is not to punish the driver, but to prevent a violation that may have tragic consequences,” Kiryanov said.
He said drivers slowed down and behaved better on the roads provided with video cameras. As a result, the number of road accidents is decreasing.