Romanian traffic police to set up fixed radars on roads, highways

A joint project involving the Romanian traffic police and the Transportation Ministry will have fixed radars set up on Romania’s highways, express, and national roads.

The electronic surveillance system, titled e-SIGUR, part of the Road Safety Strategy, will allow the authorities to keep an eye on the roads even when police squads are absent. The project is part of the EU-sponsored Recovery and Resilience Facility (PNRR) and is supposed to be implemented by December 2022.

Romania is the only country in the EU that does not have a fixed radar system. It is also the country with the lowest traffic safety in the Union, registering 93 deaths per million, compared to 20 per million in Sweden and 22 per million in Denmark, the countries with the highest degree of traffic safety.

e-SIGUR will have 500 fixed radars installed alongside Romania’s most important roads. A further 300 mobile radars will also patrol transportation routes, according to economedia. The fixed radars will be marked ahead with panels visible to the drivers. The panels will be placed at various distances from the radar itself, depending on whether it is placed near highways or localities.

The authorities emphasize that a similar system is in operation in France with great success. Fatal and non-fatal accidents decreased between 40 and 65% in the vicinity of surveillance cameras there. The rate of excessive speeding (more than 30 km/h over the limit) was also decreased fivefold since the system was put in place. In the first three years, fatalities fell in France by over 30%.

The legislative components of the new project will allow the monitoring of road traffic in an integrated system. Authorities hope that it will also, through the markings and panels, prevent unnecessary speeding.

At the moment, the traffic police can only operate at most 300 mobile radars on 18.000 km of roads in Romania, aside from the squads in major cities. Another problem is that the fines that police officers can impose are very low.

The e-SIGUR system is to be implemented in no more than 2 years after the project is approved.

(Photo source: Vlad Ispas | Dreamstime.com)