Traffic cameras

I wonder how they will deal with the many 'red plate' drivers!

Good question ... They are not coping as it is with minimal tourism..... so what chance with tourism as and when it picks up.....

If they are rental vehicles, I know in other touristic places where I've rented a car, I had to leave my credit card details with the hire company.

The problem here cynic is they currently don't have the required mechanisms to follow up and notify the hundreds of rental companies of traffic violations and the resulting fines.....

t’s been 27 days since the official rollout of the new system of traffic cameras and apparently as it turns out, no fines have yet been issued due to administrative and procedural setbacks and poor communication between government departments.

Well, there’s a surprise. According to reports, even though the cameras are recording around 800 violations a day, one department may have the public’s information stored in Greek, another in English and another in a mix of both, making it difficult to confirm a person’s place of residence and issue a fine.

Another problem that came up was that the process to issue a fine required many checks and involved numerous steps as some fines refer to multiple different violations that alter the amount of the fine and the number of points to be deducted from a person’s licence.

Was none of this foreseen in the planning stage? Did it not come up during the two-month long grace period? Could it not have been resolved in almost a month since the official rollout?

Fifteen years since the very first traffic cams fiasco, millions spent, a grace period during the pilot rollout last October, followed by an extension of the grace period by another month until the end of the year, were still not enough to get it right?

It doesn’t matter that they say the problems will be fixed within the coming days. It should not have happened this time around given the lessons of the past.

But poor planning, a lack of preparedness and abysmal communication between ministries and departments are a hallmark of the state’s bureaucracy in general, which we’ve seen time and again.

Most recently it was that ridiculous situation where the CovPass database, which holds SafePass data, was not connected to the health ministry’s Covid status database until last week after the problem became apparent which meant infected individuals were circulating freely.

Up until now, the systems were not linked, meaning that a valid SafePass would still work, even if the holder had tested positive – potentially enabling many active cases to break their self-isolation early and visit restaurants and shops. Again, it seems no one thought it through at the start. Communication between these two government systems was not even in place.

Another example is the rush to hand out grants for electric vehicles from bicycles to cars, again without having the correct infrastructure to ensure these options can be working solutions to transport problems and are not there just for show so that we can be seen to be ‘doing the right thing’.

The government needs to spend less time bragging about our wonderful state-of-the art technologies and grand plans for the fourth industrial revolution and spend more time ensuring these technologies actually work the way they’re supposed to.

It doesn’t matter how ‘smart’ the technology is if it’s not operated in a smart manner. A traffic cam system, used successfully in many other countries for decades, should have been a no brainer.

The first 6,000 fines for more than 30,00 traffic violations caught by fixed and mobile cameras have been sent out to offenders, 40 days after the system went live officially, police told CyBC radio on Thursday.

Deputy traffic chief Harris Evripidou said the out-of-court fines are being sent by registered mail together with links and passwords to a website where offenders can see details of the traffic offence as well as photographs.

Most of the offences are in residential areas, he added.

The fine must be paid within 30 days otherwise it will rise by half and must be paid within 45 days. If it is not paid by then, the case will be sent to court.

Four fixed cameras have been installed in Nicosia and police are also using four mobile cameras, the first phase of the plan that will eventually see 110 cameras across the Republic in a renewed push to stem the bloodshed on the roads.

Already beset with delays in its launch, the traffic camera scheme got off to a bumpy start when it emerged that administrative and procedural complications were holding up offenders being fined.

The first set of traffic cameras were launched on October 25 and were operating on a pilot basis until January 1, at which point fines were set to be issued.

Yet it is only 40 days after the grace period ended that the first fines have gone out, with a tangled bureaucracy and poor communication between government departments billed as the one of the main factors for the delay.

Local media reported last month that one office may have the public’s information stored in Greek, another in English and another in a mix of both, making it difficult to confirm a person’s place of residence, for example.

Mobile camera units typically record speeding violations while the fixed units also pick up passing the line at a red light, speeding, not wearing a helmet and parking on yellow lines.

The contract for the cameras includes 90 fixed units in 30 locations around the island as well as 20 mobile cameras which police will determine their location and operating hours on a daily basis.

Only three months after the first phase of the installation of traffic cameras, some motorists found in violation of road safety rules have already found creative ways to avoid paying their fines.

According to a report published by daily Politis on Monday, traffic police officers face problems when it comes to locating offenders.

Some of them are reportedly registered with the wrong address on the road transport department system, in order to avoid receiving notices of fines at home, which need to then be collected at the post office.

Others, in turn, choose to ignore phone calls from the road transport department urging them to pay their fines or even refuse to acknowledge they were driving the car, regardless of the evidence presented to them.

Any traffic fine must be paid within 30 days otherwise it rises by half and must be paid within 45 days. If it is not paid by then, the case will be sent to court.

Four fixed cameras have been installed in Nicosia and police are also using four mobile cameras, the first phase of the plan that will eventually see 110 cameras across the island in a renewed push to stem the bloodshed on the roads.

“They cannot hide forever,” a road transport department official told Politis referring to offenders who refuse to settle their fines.

“We have enough tools and databases at our disposal to eventually identify them.”

Mobile camera units typically record speeding violations while the fixed units also pick up passing the line at a red light, speeding, not wearing a helmet and parking on yellow lines.

The contract for the cameras includes 90 fixed units in 30 locations around the island as well as 20 mobile cameras which police will determine their location and operating hours on a daily basis.

Since cameras became operative on January 1, officials have registered a sharp decrease in the number of offences, going from 1,800 daily fines issued to around 900.