Traffic Police (KAT) have come up with novel software to make Sofia's drivers pay fines without having to visit KAT's headquarters in Durvenitsa in person, Bulgarian news agencies reported on December 11. The software will try to exploit the video cameras positioned on major thoroughfares around Sofia.

Currently, offenders receive letters asking them to appear at KAT's headquarters in Durvenitsa where they are shown footage and issued with a document declaring that they have committed a violation. Offenders must wait 30 days to find out the exact scale of their fine. This follows the standard procedure when you get a speeding ticket from a traffic cop on any Bulgarian road.

This procedure, however, is time-consuming, hence KAT has decided to follow foreign counterparts and introduce a system that will automatically record road offences on surveillance cameras and send them to the postal addresses of respective offenders. "Offenders," in this case, means the owners of the motor vehicles, not necessarily the offending driver. Owners will get a photograph of the offence in the post together with the time, place and date of the incident. Payment can even be made via mobile operators. To improve the efficiency of collecting fines, KAT also hopes to convince Parliament to introduce new legislation compelling offenders to pay their fines without the right to contest them.

Interior Minister Mihail Mikov also had the same idea when he told private national broadcaster bTV on December 13 that he would insist on an amendment to the Traffic Act. Mikov maintains that KAT's efforts have been scuppered by the large number of people successfully challenging road fines in court based on video camera footage.
This practice has shown that, when viewed in evidence, video camera footage could easily be overruled by the court. "People can see different things when looking at the same camera footage," Mikov told bTV, implying that any offender with time, money and a good lawyer could successfully contest a driving fine based on camera footage. Hence the ministry's decision to amend the legislation and stop people protesting against road fines based on video footage.

A comparison of several KAT statistics, released in the beginning of December, shows this trend. In a December 1 report, quoted by Bulgarian-language daily  Dnevnik, Sofia police said that, since the beginning of the year, more than 4000 road offences have been registered by video cameras. However, other statistics quoted by Bulgarian-language Monitor daily said that for the 11 months of 2008 a total of 158 474 traffic violation fines have been issued by Sofia police. Comparing both sets of data shows that cameras accounted only for little more than 2.5 per cent of all traffic fines in Sofia.