A “unified end-to-end system for intercepting and tracing vehicles” is being deployed on the roads of a huge region of Russia: the Central Federal District (CFD), which spans across 650,200 square kilometers.
Dubbed ‘Web’ (Паутина), this software platform is connected with road traffic operational services, allowing the authorities to trace and analyze “the movements of cars and people.” Photos of all trips of each car are analyzed, helping the police “work more efficiently” — in particular, to identify persistent traffic offenders and retrieve stolen vehicles.
In the future, the Ministry of Interior intends to use the system to support an electronic appeal procedure for fines related to traffic violations. Integrated with Russia’s public services portal Gosuslugi.ru, this appeal procedure will spare drivers the need to personally contact the traffic police.
“The main goal of the system is to improve the safety of movement within the Central Federal District,” say the Moscow City authorities. This district is home to more than 39 million people who own 28% of all cars registered in Russia, accounting for most of Russia’s passenger traffic and up to 40% of freight traffic.
This system was initially developed by the Moscow City authorities at the municipal level. “Thanks to it, in five years, it was possible to reduce the number of car thefts (from 8,700 hijackings in 2015 to 1,600 by the end of 2020) and to increase crime detection rate,” said Egor Chernov, Deputy Head of the photo and video recording directorate of the Center of Traffic Organization.
In an exchange with East-West Digital News, Maria Sigalova of MosGosTransProekt said that similar solutions are in use in many large cities of the world. However, she added, “we never came across systems that would unite several large regions of a state or the entire country as a whole.”
Asked about the treatment of personal data and potential concerns about citizens’ right to privacy, she answered: “The system does not collect or store personal data. With the help of cameras, only information about the vehicle is collected in real time and checked in databases of wanted cars. The system stores photographs of fixations from cameras, which indicate the time, place and direction of movement. All this helps solve crimes related to theft or theft of vehicles, and is also used to search for cars that have fled from the scene of an accident. Only law enforcement agencies have access to the system.”
Featured image created by gstudioimagen via Freepik
