Police start high-tech parking patrols

Starting from today, police are prowling the city’s streets looking for parking violators with high-tech monitoring equipment.

“The center of traffic management now has 10 Ford Focus cars equipped with mobile parking violation detectors cruising the city’s streets,” Interfax quoted a transport department spokesperson as saying on Friday.

The new initiative is part of a recently announced overhaul of the capital’s traffic management systems, which includes new multifunctional traffic cameras that by year’s end will number some 150 and have snared 20,000 infractions already.

Police are hoping that he new system will provide a similar level of support to their efforts to thwart parking violators. “The new method of recording violation has been called in to help in the battle against traffic jams,” the editor of Avtoizvestia, Dmitry Semenov said.