Municipal Council requests country’s leadership to set higher fines for unauthorized parking

Municipal Council will address to the Government and President in order to be set higher fines to the drivers parking the cars on the pavement. According to the author of the request, the communist councilor Valeri Pavlov, the situation when the pavements of Chisinau municipality are full of cars and the pedestrians have no place to move cannot be tolerated anymore. „Many accidents happen, the drivers ignore the road rules regarding the parking, and the road police cannot or does not want to sanction them,” Pavlov noted. He mentioned that he has examined together with the responsible persons within the Ministry of Informational Technologies the possibility to set a computerized supervision and fining system of such drivers, inclusively for excluding the possibility that the sanctioned ones avoid paying the fines through wangling. On the other hand, the councilor of the „Ravnopravie” Movement, Valeri Climenco, shares the opinion that this initiative hides another aim, namely that of supervising the inhabitants of the capital, as the interested services might shoot and use the information as they wish. At the same time, Climenco admits that such a system could be applied only where no policemen are supervising the traffic. According to the independent councilor Mihai Roscovan, this request shows the incapacity of local public authorities to fight the phenomenon of unauthorized parking. He said that the mayoralty should, as priority, to create authorized parking and than to set fines for illegal parking. The deputy commissioner of Chisinau’s Road Police Office, Petru Corduneanu, mentioned, at CMC meeting, that the low fines of 9 lei for illegal parking are not convincing the drivers to give up to this violation. He even underscored that a draft law on changing the Code of Administrative Offences, stipulating the increase of the fines for illegal parking already exits, and the majority of councilors agreed on the fact that the country’s leadership must take an urgent decision in this respect. The idea about the necessity of establishing day parking in municipality and especially in the center of Chisinau, where the flow of cars is very high, is discussed for a long time by the local authorities, but its approval is postponed because the Government did not approve the new Regulation on Parking activity in Chisinau Municipality. Their activity was ceased few years ago, as they were not properly organized and were creating inconveniencies to pedestrians, as well as to the road traffic.