Looking at the figures, the traffic situation in Estonia worsened in one year, as both the number of deaths and injuries increased. In one year, 59 people died on the roads and 1,942 were injured. This is a move in the opposite direction to the goals set in the national road safety program.

Some experts have questioned or even criticized the Ministry's messages on how to address the worsening traffic situation. For example, the decision not to use the penalty point system, which had been under development for years, prompted concerns. There is also an ongoing public debate over the possibility of medium-speed cameras being installed, as well as potential privacy problems. So there are many angles from which to look at traffic problems.

But first of all, Minister Michal, statistics aside, how do you subjectively feel about the road safety situation on Estonian roads and city streets?

Well, I would say that the overall level of road safety in Estonia is good, but that doesn't mean that there is no room for improvement. Looking back, the road culture has significantly improved over time. A little more than a decade ago, our roads claimed the lives of 100 people per year. Today, it is about half that.

However, the three main road safety issues remain: speed, drink-driving, and failure to use safety equipment, and these are certainly areas that the public and all of us need to address systematically.

But is it safe to drive with your family on a Friday night, with the kids in the backseat, from Tallinn to Tartu or Tallinn to Pärnu?

Yes, there is an overall sense of safety. If you drive sensibly, don't get overly impulsive or anxious, and don't set unrealistic expectations on the road, you will feel safe in general.

But in general, a lot depends on your personal traffic behavior; generally speaking, the simple rule is that if you start on time, you'll get there more or less on time. If you start later, you won't make up for it in traffic.

If we were to compare ourselves to the Nordic and Baltic countries, we would want to be like Sweden, where 22 people per million die in road accidents each year, rather than Latvia, where 79 people per million die in accidents every year.

In Finland, cars travel in large groups with a speed limit of 80, yet there are no dangerous overtaking maneuvers. In rare cases, when you witness an erratic individual attempting to pass a one-kilometer column in the rear-view mirror, you know it's an Estonian plate car. So how can we improve Estonia's traffic safety and road culture?

It takes time to evolve, but we can certainly accelerate progress.
Remember that the Nordic countries have been addressing road safety, particularly through infrastructure development and driver training, for decades longer than we have.

Recall that Estonia only introduced its first road safety program in 2003, a time when over 200 people lost their lives on the roads annually. Of course, the more we move forward in time, the better we become; the fewer accidents happen, the fewer people die, and the harder it is to stay on the right track. But we must certainly try. In 2022, for example, there were 50 road fatalities in Estonia, making us eighth in the European Union in terms of road safety.

But if the numbers are small and the population is small, then any accident will, of course, have a bigger impact on these statistics.

But Estonia has been stagnating in this area for 10 years. Experts say a leap forward was made in 2010, and the European Transport Safety Council awarded Estonia for improvements in road safety, while Minister Juhan Parts received the award for reducing Estonia's road fatality rate. How are you doing to ensure that you can receive the award for the next development leap, perhaps in a few years?

Now I have to correct the facts a bit. The level of road safety in Estonia has changed significantly in 10 years. Ten years ago, if we take 2014, we had 81 fatalities, and today, if we look at the previous years, the number is 59 in 2023 and 50 in 2022.

The long-term trend is still towards better traffic and safety; that's what we can tell our (radio) listeners who are concerned about traffic and the safety of Estonian people.

The trend is for the better, but we certainly need to get off this plateau, and that means different and more investments in infrastructure, it also means changes in driving behavior, it means different skills, and it means improvements in people's behavior.

But let's talk more specifically about the measures that have been discussed in society and in the Transport Committee. I have been working as a journalist for 25 years, and I can remember stories about the design of a penalty point system for just as long. Could you please explain why the Ministry decided this year to postpone the implementation of the penalty point system, which would have been reintroduced in 2021?

Madis Hindre wrote in a news article on the ERR portal on April 18:

"In January this year, the government's transportation committee met again. At the meeting, the undersecretary for the Ministry of the Interior, Tarmo Miilits, asked Climate Minister Kristen Michal about the state of the penalty point system. 'We are not implementing a penalty point system; instead, a system for sanctioning serious offenders is being developed," Michal replied. Egert Belichev, the director general of the Police and Border Guard Board, then asked why the country was not moving forward with that penalty point system. 'There is no political consensus,' the minister replied."

So this is how Hindre described the situation. Kristen Michal, could you please explain to the radio listeners why there is no political consensus on the implementation of the error point system?

The introduction of the penalty point system was not agreed by the coalition, otherwise, it would have already been passed into law. In 2021, also mentioned here, a possible version of the penalty point system was drawn up by experts, but it would have affected a quarter of all driver's license holders, or about 160,000 people.

My memory may be failing me, but I recall that the ERR, and probably the editor-in-chief himself, were openly critical of this penalty system. So there is no consensus in society that this demerit system should be such that a quarter of the population is in the system one way or another.

And secondly, the simple answer is that it wasn't even on the table because it wasn't agreed to in any way in today's coalition. Otherwise, it would be in the coalition agreement and it would be in the government's work plan.

So there was no such agreement.

What we are doing, and what our plan is – what we have said, what is being worked on – is precisely the part that deals with the most serious offenders – an estimated two to five percent – and particularly those who are repeat offenders, the more serious offenders, so to get them off the road and behaving sensibly.

Just to be clear, is the Reform Party opposed to the implementation of a penalty system?

I have not seen this endorsement from other parties, either. If I do, I will notify you immediately which parties are in favor and which are against it. Today, there is no political consensus and no proposal for this debate.

After all, the police still support the introduction of this penalty point system.

To put it kindly, the police are simply not one of the parties that would be in parliament.

I quote Ltn. Col. Sirje Loigo: "For serious criminals, there are indeed measures in the country today, but the problem is with the top offenders, who have a double-digit number of offenses, and we don't have a single measure in the country to help improve their behavior. This is because the short procedure only provides for a fine. But small offenses become big ones. Sooner or later, a person who violates the traffic rules on a daily basis will cause a traffic accident that will have very tragic consequences for someone." What is your answer to that?

/.../ Now, with regard to both minor and more serious offenses, I would personally respond that if someone missed the deadline for a road test, which I think I may have done once, or left the paperwork at home, do we necessarily expect them to be subject to this point system and national action? Sounds like a witch hunt. It used to be: first you listen to jazz, then you betray your country.

But maybe we shouldn't overdo the national database thing. As a society, especially at a time when we are short of resources, short of money – a lot of money has to be invested in defense, homeland security, and etcetera. – so I would start by picking the biggest problems first, which transportation experts estimate to be between 2 and 5 percent, and put the emphasis on that.

And if society says this is not enough, that it needs to be expanded, then deal with that. But instead of starting by putting everybody who left their papers at home or didn't have a road test into the demerit system and saying, great, we've got them in the database now, let's see what happens next.

One of the transport committee members I spoke with in preparation for the interview raised the question of why we are no longer discussing the substantive need for and impact of the penalty point system, but rather its ideological appropriateness. How would you respond?

Indeed, the discussion is still ongoing. The same question of how large a scale to put people on, and how low a threshold to put individuals on a national criminal database, to begin tracking them, and to presume that every small step becomes a bigger step, is a very significant discussion in terms of resources and decision-making. To say that we are now going to put everything in the database, even the simplest things, and pay special attention and monitor how it gets there, is a really serious question.

Is there any use in maintaining a traffic committee, or may it be abolished since only political decisions are made and the committee's professional suggestions are ignored? Again, this is not a question from me, but rather from an expert in the field.

Good question. I think the committee has a sense and a purpose. It discusses substantive issues, there are various experts in the field on a daily or regular basis. Rather, we are discussing today in the Ministry of Climate to change the work of the Committee on Road Traffic a little, but only in the direction of giving the Committee a slightly broader role. Proposals on how this could be done will be made in the development of the 2026+ road safety program.

So it has a role, the debates are substantive, and for example, the very decision that the Department of Transportation can go ahead with a more detailed study of the effects of medium-speed cameras came from the committee after the debate.

Indrek Sirk, an expert in traffic law and a member of the commission, said in a recent interview with Vikerraadio that the weakness of the current system is that we do not have universally usable data on all offenses.

If the police register 80,000 offenses a year, half of them are dealt with in summary proceedings, which do not appear in the criminal record. So when a police officer stops a driver who has broken a traffic law, such as speeding, that person may appear to him to have a clean record, even though the same driver may have just been fined for the same offense in the form of a summary proceeding.

So the police do not know that this is a serial offender who systematically endangers other people on the road. This is how attorney Sirk describes the problem.

I think that if there is a perception and an actual problem that the measures in place are not having an effect on road behavior, then the penalty policy should be changed.

This is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice; for example, a more general increase in the level of fines is now being implemented with the intention of having a greater impact on different types of behavior that violate the rules.

So it's a matter of criminal policy. If it is determined that a measure is ineffective, it must be changed in criminal policy, which is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice.

Road safety experts have pointed out that drunk driving or speeding, for example, are deterred not only by the severity of the law's penalties, but also by the practical likelihood that there will be a police patrol on the road to apprehend the drunk driver.

For example, if a drunk driver hasn't seen a police patrol for five years on the road between his city center and the village where he lives, and he decides to drive for a drink on a Friday night. What do you think? Is it not your ministry's job? Is it the Ministry of the Interior's responsibility? Are there flaws in the frequency and capability of traffic controls? So such drivers have a real sense of not getting behind the wheel?

If we debate beforehand that the police and public resources should be used with great dedication to prosecute all the easy cases and assume that the police and state would have the resources to deal with real traffic surveillance, perhaps with more complex offenses in more remote places, then let us say that the capacity of the Estonian taxpayer, if at the same time we want to maintain the Estonian language and culture, to maintain a decent education system, cannot be expected to allocate money to everything in the same way.

I believe the police, at least in terms of the traffic committee, are doing their best to enforce traffic laws, and I would expect that if they receive a signal that there is a problem with traffic behavior somewhere, they would certainly try to address it.

But I would say that the picture needs to be broadened. Ultimately, it is not just the responsibility of the police; some of it is the responsibility of the road users, and some of it is the responsibility of the community, the neighbors, and certainly the municipalities.

For example, the government has recently submitted a bill to the Riigikogu, which is expected to be discussed next week. The bill concerns road safety, with a special focus on the safety of cyclists. Local authorities must be able to set lower speed limits for scooters, for example, so that certain areas are safer and there are fewer accidents.

So it's still a broader endeavor, and I think everybody also needs to understand that the fear of punishment, the inevitability of punishment, is not the only measure of personal ethical discipline.

We mentioned here the possibility of setting up a system of sanctions for serious violations. Can you describe it already?

I can only give a brief outline of the scope, because the entire design of the system itself is underway today by our transportation people, and we'll be able to go into more detail in a program when the time comes.

But on the scale, it is mainly those at the higher end of the so-called "severe" end of the scale who are affected. So about 2 to 5 percent. And it's primarily a question of how we can make sure that these people either don't get behind the wheel again or that the penalties are such that they don't behave in this way again.

Then there are also the various activities that already exist today, conversations, discussions, all the rest of it, training.

But let's also talk about average speed cameras and the pilot project to measure them, which the transport department also presented two weeks ago to this transport committee, which advises the government. Sander Salmu, deputy secretary-general at the Ministry of Climate, said after the committee meeting that today's cameras are not technically and system-wise ready for this solution.

The second problem is a legal one, so there will definitely be no system in Estonia in the next two or three years. Minister Michal, what is your position on the introduction of these medium-speed cameras in Estonia? Has it been put on hold, will they not come at all, or could they come after certain problems have been solved?

This is an adequate depiction; however, in order to make a decision, we must answer the following questions: what will the technical feasibility of the equipment be after the test, what will it look like, what will the costs be, what will the possible advantages be, and the legal justifications.

For example, in the case of average speed cameras, there was a legal argument over how to estimate average speed so that no one's data is gathered or recorded in a way that violates a person's privacy more than is necessary to identify the offender. During the pilot project, this was done anonymously.

How will it be in the future? I believe it will not be an insurmountable challenge because it is a fairly typical average speed measurement in European countries, and it is not unusual to see only in one European country.

So this analysis, the legal analysis that is being done again by our transport department in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice, as well as a review of the technical readiness of these cameras and what kind of cameras are required in the first place, is expected to take two to three years, but it may be done sooner. So once we have that knowledge and analysis, we could decide whether to apply this as a traffic safety measure.

Because you underlined this component of political consensus and political will at the beginning of the interview, if I may sum up that you do not currently have the political will to say that this medium-speed camera project will never materialize.

It would be strange for me to say whether it's coming or not when we don't know whether it's coming or not. The technical answers are partly there, but they are more about technicalities of traffic, but which cameras and the issues of protecting people's fundamental rights are certainly important.

If we are able to get those answers, then whoever is the climate minister or whoever is in any other decision-making role at that time will make the proposal.

Ideally, the analysis that the Ministry of Climate has requested from its Department of Transport should look at such a camera system, or at least at whether such a camera system exists that measures the average speed and allows you to check whether you have paid road tax, whether your car is insured, and whether it has been inspected. Is that correct?

Physical monitoring is being replaced by automated surveillance, which is the future of transportation and the transportation industry overall. Perhaps the connection is not always appropriate, but automatic license plate recognition systems can be found in parking garages, and traffic can automatically determine whether someone has paid a toll, among other things.

So we certainly need to have a society-wide debate about what level of involvement is appropriate for us. One is the medium speed camera side, the other is all the other automatic tracking as well.

The transportation experts do their analysis now. Then, they engage in working-level communication with the various ministries, before taking the matter to the political table. And then, of course, there's a debate between the executive and the parliament. So, I dare say, it will take years before we get there. However, achieving this requires resolving the fundamental rights issues, as well as the interplay between fundamental rights, road safety, and automation. So we have to be open-minded and look for those solutions.

In a popular opinion program on Vikerraadio, Anvar Samost has for many years been very critical of the methods of traffic control – speed cameras, the system of penalty points, speed traps – that are used in Estonia and that are planned. Can we now summarize this traffic issue that the Minister of Climate Kristen Michal from the Reform Party has listened to and that these recommendations of officials and traffic experts to create databases and more controls – there will not be – the politician has made a decision?

I don't know how to put this politely, but let's just say that every valid opinion carries some weight and influence. If there is substance to it, we in our ministry, or at least I, have tried to maintain a culture where we are not so proud to think that our solution is always the best.

If somebody has a substantive argument, we will certainly listen to it. We will listen to fundamental rights arguments, but on the other hand, we are also always looking for solutions that will increase road safety.

That is why we in the transportation committee today also gave the transportation department and the transportation experts the task of looking for solutions, including automatic speed enforcement systems.

So I don't know if anything of that nature or substance came from Samost, or if anything came out of that broadcast, but in any case, I thank him and wish him good luck with the broadcast.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!