Drunken drivers is one of the greatest problems of Chisinau

The Municipal Police Station shows that the number of drunken drivers, in the capital and suburbs, is rather high. According to Vice-commissioner Petru Corduneanu, at the end of last week alone, 26 drunken drivers were registered in the city, as result of police raids, including very drunk ones. Corduneanu notes that public appeals in mass media did made Chisinau’s roads safer. He shares the opinion that sanctions applied to drunken drivers are not very severe, they being deprived of their driving license for 12 months and obliged to pay a fine of 800 lei. It is necessary, he states, that drunken drivers are dispossessed of driving licenses for an unlimited term. From the beginning of the year, 586 traffic accidents were registered in Chisinau municipality, compared with 575 in the same period of 2005. They resulted in 36 lethal casualties, compared with 52 – in 6 months of 2005, and 755 injured persons, compared with 694 in 2005. Among the causes of the accidents, first ranks car hitting (160 accidents), followed by excessive speed (109), ignoring the pedestrians’ crossing sings (55), drunken driving (36), overtaking (25), and non-respect of semaphore’s signs (24 accidents).