We and other media wrote that in 13 regions since the beginning of the year, accidents have increased on stretches of road where stationary cameras have been installed to detect violations. So during 9 months of 2022 there were more accidents under cameras due to:
- 19% in the Moscow region,
- 45% in the Chelyabinsk region,
- 71.4% in the Irkutsk region,
- 2.3% in the Ryazan region,
- 41.7% in Kamchatka,
- 300% in Crimea.
The Road Safety Knowledge Center of the Ministry of the Interior believes that restraint systems themselves cause accidents when drivers suddenly change direction and speed when they see the camera. Dissatisfied with the affairs on cameras and in the prosecutor general’s office, as well as in the leadership of the traffic police.
But there is another point of view, which was put forward by an expert from MADI in the publication Za Rulem, the oldest and most popular automotive publication in Russia.
Rinat GematudinovAssociate Professor, Department of Manufacturing Process Automation, MADI:
— Recently, there have been media reports that accidents have increased in the working area of photo and video shooting complexes. The data is taken from the statistics published by the traffic police for the nine months of this year. It says that in some regions more accidents happen in places where cameras are installed. If you don’t know the accounting functions for these metrics, you can easily be misled. This is what happened.
How are accidents now kept under traffic cameras? They take all the points where they stand and count the indicators of the number of accidents, deaths and injuries at these points since the beginning of the calendar year. That is, now we have calculated all accidents since January 2022. Sounds logical? Not really.
The fact is that not in all subjects of the Russian Federation cameras outweigh once a year. This is exactly what the Ministry of Transport of the Moscow region has told. Analysts are at work in this region, who are continuously working to identify new emergency sections of roads. Accordingly, the complexes of photo-video fixation are quickly moved to them, as soon as such a “hotbed of accident” is discovered. And this can happen halfway through the calendar year, for example. This approach is more than justified: if the response is postponed until the end of the year, it is not known how many people will die in this place.
The paradox lies in the fact that the traffic police methodology does not take into account similar existing practices for the use of photo and video recording complexes. It turns out that the traffic police, as it were, automatically assumes that all cameras are installed at the beginning of the year, and that all accidents that have occurred since the beginning of the year are recorded on the camera bill, even if in fact it appeared at this place, say, not until August. At the same time, it must be understood that the effect of the camera does not occur immediately, but on average two months after installation. As a result, the figures we now have in the report do not show the real effect of cameras on the number of accidents.
So how should it be? To really see if installing a camera in a particular place has an effect, one has to compare the accident rates from at least one year before and one year after installation.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example.
We take a quiet part of the road, where accidents have never happened before. Imagine that at some point (let’s take December 2021 as a starting point) the nature of traffic on it changed – for example, a large residential complex was built nearby, the residents began to actively cross the road to school and a supermarket on the other side, and drivers often started turning left to enter the LCD screen.
This had consequences for the number of accidents: in this section one accident with fatalities was registered every month. The traffic police drew attention to the problem in March 2022 and decided to place a stationary complex for photo and video recordings. It took about a month – the approval process, the preparation of the TMP, the installation and setup of the camera took so much. At the end of April 2022, the FVF complex appeared in the problem area. The effect occurred two months after the camera operation started and since about July the number of accidents at the location has fallen to zero.
But what do we see on paper, in the calculations according to the existing traffic police methods? The figures indicate that at point X, where the camera is installed, one accident was recorded in 2021 and 5 accidents in 2022. The increase in accidents at the camera installation site is 500%. According to these figures, the installation of the FVF complex seems not only inefficient, but a mistake with the opposite effect of accidents. At the same time, the camera actually fulfilled its mission and the number of accidents decreased.