Under supervision: Russia will establish a single control center for drivers

Photo: TASS / Dmitry Feoktistov

This will protect the personal data of car owners and make it easier to track down cars.

In Russia, there are plans to create a single control center for drivers, which will collect information from all traffic cameras in the country, Izvestia news agency found out. This will improve the existing system of photo and video registration of traffic rules violations, still tied to the regional data centers. In particular, it is planned to exclude unjustified access of officials to personal data of car owners and to form a single base for automatic vehicle search. According to preliminary information, the project will cost over 100 million of rubles.

In one basket

Work is under way in Russia to create a single federal centre for automatic registration of traffic violations (TSAFAP). It will aggregate information on violations from road cameras from all regions of Russia. This is reported in the materials of the National Technological Initiative (NTI) "Autonet", with which Izvestia got acquainted.
One of the representatives of NTI "Autonet" confirmed that the creation of the single TSAFAP is in work. According to him, a pilot prototype of the system has already been developed by GLONASS Union.
Data from the cameras will be uploaded to the federal segment of the single TSAFAP. The project involves the use of both existing equipment in the Russian regions and the installation of new equipment. The term of the system deployment will be from two to five months, the cost - about 100 million rubles.
Today more than 16 thousand road cameras, including mobile ones, are installed on Russian roads. Last year, 142 million fines were issued for 106.5 billion rubles, of which more than 80% - with the help of cameras. Information from the complexes is initially received by local servers in the regions. And after collection and processing it is transferred to the federal information system FIS GIBDD-M.

Evgeny Belyanko, Vice-President of GLONASS Union Technologies, told Izvestia that the prototype was created on the basis of the Avtodata service telematics platform (car manufacturers and dealers are involved in its formation).
“Today, at the regional level, in a number of cases, technical means of control are used, the methods and principles of which do not meet the requirements of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Also there is no possibility to monitor the performance of regional systems from the federal center," he said.

According to him, verification of access of employees of the operating organisation to the information of the single TSAFAP will be carried out with the help of an electronic signature. And all downloaded materials - to be checked for compliance with the requirements of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (type of complex, its location, type of violation). Substandard materials will be automatically rejected.

According to the NTI “Autonet” materials, the data from each region's photo and video registration cameras processed in the single TSAFAP will be uploaded to the corresponding regional systems for making decisions on traffic rules violation. The unified system will allow excluding not only installation of cameras in the wrong places and illegal fines, but also unauthorized access to personal data of car owners (for this purpose the official will have to form a motivated request and confirm it with an electronic signature).
The Ministry of Internal Affairs also supports the creation of the federal automatic registration system, said a source of Izvestia, familiar with the situation.  According to him, a pilot project has already been launched in several regions in order to test new principles of operation. As a basic version, registration complexes and operation principles of TSAFAP-Moskva (operating in Moscow and the Moscow region only) are used, said the interlocutor of Izvestia. The MIA project is of more scale and will need investing of about 1 billion rubles because of the installation of unified software and violation registration complexes.

Flawed control

In the Autonet materials it is explained that the existing road cameras system for photo and video registration has some weak points. In particular, it is not protected from access by third parties to data on the movement of special vehicles - military convoys, motorcades of top officials and vehicles involved in search and counter-terrorism operations.

There is also a risk of unauthorized or uncontrolled access of regional officials to personal data of car owners, the presentation says. In addition, there are no unified standards of operation of the centers, which negatively affects the correctness of fines and there is no federal system of automated vehicle search based on the materials of violations registration in the regions.

Under the current system, car owners are also not protected from the original cameras data falsification by local officials "for corrupt or other personal purposes”. Such cases were in the regions. For example, in 2013, residents of Krasnodar Region faced mass falsification of these speed measurement systems, which resulted in tens of thousands of fines being illegally issued (a criminal case was investigated).

Expert on photo and video registration complexes Grigory Shukhman noted that cameras on the roads themselves are a good tool to reduce accidents and deaths in accidents. Thus, according to the traffic police, in 2019, the number of deaths on the roads decreased to 16.9 thousand people against 18.2 thousand a year earlier.
However, according to him, it couldn’t be a panacea for accidents. The validity of the signs should also be checked periodically to avoid the generation of unfair fines, the expert said.
According to Grigory Shukhman, unified requirements to photo and video registration complexes and unified methods of evaluation of materials from them are necessary. This will allow, among other things, to introduce a full service of electronic appeal of punishment, as well as to identify errors in the work of cameras to avoid absurd penalties, he said.

In his turn, Mikhail Blinkin, Director of the Institute of Transport Economics and Transport Policy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, warned about the risk of monopolization of the market of technical means for automatic registration of traffic rules violations during the creation of the federal TSAFAP.

“It's technically possible to create a single data center, but it's hardly reasonable, as the local authorities are responsible for organising the traffic today”, he told Izvestia.

At the same time, the expert agreed that such a center may be useful for solving serious crimes.

Read the news in the source: iz.ru