Traffic rules finally set in motion – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) dated 09/06/2022

As Kommersant found out, disputes between officials over the possibility of pointwise changes in the rules of the road (SDA) have ended. This has been banned since 2021 due to the “regulatory guillotine” rule: since then, for any smallest amendments, it was required to reissue the SDA as a whole. Because of this, long overdue projects have been frozen, including the regulation of the movement of electric scooters, the introduction of new road signs and parking rules. Now the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Internal Affairs have won the right to amend the document until 2029, the corresponding decree will be signed in the near future. The government, in fact, gave officials six years to prepare fundamentally new traffic rules, work on which must begin now, experts say.

The government subcommittee on improving the control and licensing functions of government agencies has approved a draft resolution allowing changes to the traffic rules, a source in the White House told Kommersant. “After the adoption, it will be possible to make changes to the rules without reissuing them,” the interlocutor of Kommersant said. Amendments can be made until 2029, several other sources told Kommersant. Now the decree must be signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, after which the document will come into force.

SDA, we recall, were approved in 1993 and since then have been corrected more than 50 times. In 2021, the “regulatory guillotine” rule (Government Decree No. 2467) began to work, which prohibited changing the rules without a complete reissue. The Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Internal Affairs have been trying for a long time to achieve an exception for traffic rules, proving at all levels that the reissue is an extremely laborious procedure, which makes it impossible to quickly respond to changing traffic conditions and an increase in accidents. However, the departments faced serious opposition from the Ministry of Justice and the White House apparatus. They believed that the SDA could be republished in its entirety, even if only the reference to GOST or one word needed to be changed in the document. These disputes, as Kommersant said, continued for more than a year and a half.

The approved but not yet formalized decision brings several draft amendments out of the frozen state. The most urgent is the issue of regulating the movement of “means of individual mobility” (IM). The Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Internal Affairs have been talking about this for the third year against the backdrop of a growing accident rate involving electric scooters. As Kommersant has repeatedly told, the departments intend to introduce various restrictions for them and even create a separate category of traffic participants. The same package contains norms that are not related to SIM, for example, a ban on stopping cars on safety islands or the appearance of new signs “Charging electric vehicles” and “No buses”.

In parallel, the Ministry of Internal Affairs will be able to change another document legally related to traffic rules by one government decree – “List of malfunctions and conditions under which the operation of vehicles is prohibited.” The draft amendments to it have also been ready for a long time (“Kommersant” also talked about it) and is in the government. It is also known about the package of changes from the Ministry of Finance: it concerns the right of customs officers to stop heavy trucks.

The deadline “until 2029” seems far away, but time is short, emphasizes Yevgeny Litvin, co-chairman of the “Road Safety” working group within the framework of the “regulatory guillotine”. “Work on the new rules should start now. The amount of work to be done is colossal,” he says. “The current rules were actually written back in the 1980s, when there were completely different cars and driving conditions. We have unmanned vehicles, electric vehicles on the way, the relationship between traffic participants is fundamentally different. The rules should be written in simple language, all ambiguous interpretations should be excluded from them. According to the expert, it will take about three years only to collect proposals from departments and experts, another two years will take public discussion of the first draft and its completion. Then it will take several years to prepare for the new traffic rules to come into force. At the same time, Yevgeny Litvin notes, all this time local and point changes can be made to the rules. “Amendments are needed as a quick solution to the problem with SIM,” adds Alexander Kholodov, a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation. “But the analysis shows that traffic rules still need to be rewritten. They have been patched so many times, but many terms need to be changed a long time ago. So 2029 is the deadline for this work.”

Ivan Buranov