The Road Safety Programme 2016-2025 aims to reduce the number of road fatalities and serious injuries. From 2023 to 2025, the average number of road fatalities should not exceed 40 and the average number of serious injuries should not exceed 302 per year. However, the average number of road fatalities between 2020 and 2022 has been 55. It is clear that without additional risk landscape changes and the implementation of actions that have a significant impact on road safety, it will not be possible to reduce road deaths and serious injuries.
Last year, the Government's traffic committee handled activities that have a significant impact on road safety, one of which was the automatic average speed check on road sections. The committee decided that, before proceeding with possible solutions, it is necessary to find out whether speeding is a problem in Estonia and what the impact of the speed checks on safety could be.
The realisation of the proposed test project requires the fulfilment of legal and technical prerequisites.
Legal: The Personal Data Protection Act (IKS) provides specification for the processing of personal data. IKS § 6 allows the processing of personal data pseudonymously and without the consent of the data subject for research. According to subsection 5 of the same section, analyses and studies carried out by the executive for the purpose of policy-making are also considered research.
Before the study can be carried out, permission must be sought from the Data Protection Inspectorate (DPI). The study request is the basis of the application submission. The Ministry of the Environment has submitted a study application to the Transport Administration (on 6 July 2023) and the Transport Agency will submit the application to the DPI in the coming days.
Technical: After considering various options, the Transport Administration decided to carry out the test project using existing speed cameras, the secure traffic enforcement information system database that has been in operation for 14 years and a simple data analytics solution.
All traffic monitoring systems used in the test project will be disconnected from the data processing process and cases will not be forwarded for processing even if the vehicle's immediate speed is significantly higher than the permitted speed.
The project will be carried out on stretches of road already covered by speed cameras. Speed cameras do not have to be continuous and speeds may vary within a section. This is done by measuring the lengths of sections of the road at different speeds and calculating the time needed to complete the section based on the maximum speeds allowed.
Prior to the start of the test project, additional traffic control devices will be installed to inform road users of the average speed measurement ahead and of the length of the section before it begins.
The process is provisionally planned as follows, but depending on the decision of the DPI, it may be changed or cancelled if the request for a study is not granted.
- The registration number of the motor vehicle entering and exiting the average speed measurement check is recorded by traffic supervision equipment and transmitted as a recording to the traffic supervision database https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/103052019005 (opens in a new tab).
- The automatic recognition of the vehicle registration plate number and its conversion into machine-readable form will be done with computer software in the database.
- The machine-readable form of the registration mark shall be pseudonymised without human intervention.
- The data from the recording will not be transferred to data processing (PPA’s information system POLIS) and will not be stored but deleted from the database and destroyed. The de-pseudonymisation key will also be destroyed.
- During data processing the pseudonymised codes detected by one speed camera are compared to the pseudonymised codes detected by another speed camera. If the same pseudonymised code is found, the average speed of the vehicle over the section is calculated from these two noted times.
Details
- During the test project no queries to registers or other databases will be made.
- The vehicle, its owner and the responsible user are not identified.
- The owner of the vehicle is not identified.
- No event, regardless of whether it exceeds the average speed or immediate speed limit, will be prosecuted.
- Warning letters and penalty notices will not be issued or sent.
- Event data is destroyed immediately after pseudonymisation.
- The de-pseudonymisation key will also be destroyed.
- Only pseudonymised data is processed.
