Does the flasher work?

The Public Chamber proposes to reduce the number of permitted cars with special signals from 962 to 200. At the same time, Deputy Secretary of the Chamber Mikhail Ostrovsky said at a round table, about which Moskovsky Komsomolets writes, that flashing lights should not be issued to departments, but personally, to specific officials who perform special tasks. For the unlawful use of flashing lights, he proposed depriving people of their rights.

Another member of the OP, lawyer Elena Lukyanova, noted among those to whom flashing lights were allocated without reason, Minister of Culture Alexander Avdeev and film director Nikita Mikhalkov. In her opinion, it is necessary to compile a list of positions that deserve flashing lights - and what positions can be included in this list should be submitted for public discussion.

The head of the chamber’s working group on improving legislation in the field of road safety, Anatoly Kucherena, said that it is necessary to count the cars with flashing lights “and post the relevant information with names on the government website.”

Some members of the OP generally spoke out for the complete abolition of flashing lights for officials. According to the newspaper, the result of the round table was to be the adoption of a resolution distributed in advance, which proposed that the president exclude from the traffic rules provisions that give advantages to cars with blue flashing lights. Mikhail Blinkin, scientific director of the Transport Research Institute, who was invited to the round table, noted that, for example, in the USA, an exception was made only for the presidential motorcade, and then only during official trips. Dean of MADI, Professor Anatoly Ryabchinsky, frightened those gathered by the fact that a new rule had already appeared in the traffic rules, ordering pedestrians to urgently leave the zebra crossing when a car with a flashing light approaches.

And yet the moderates prevailed over the radicals. Thus, a member of the OP, the editor-in-chief of the Expert magazine, generally expressed the opinion that the flashing lights of officials do not affect the traffic situation, because there are still much more flashing lights on police and fire trucks.