Govt proposes stricter traffic rules, faster punishment

Budapest, July 20 (MTI) - The government plans to tighten traffic fine laws, introducing more deterrents and increasing the share of instant penalties to make road traffic safer and procedures faster, Nepszabadsag daily said on Wednesday.

Proposals now on the table would make the gap between on-the-spot fines and ones paid later in legal proceedings even bigger. If a traffic offender is found guilty in court, the fine imposed there would be much higher than if the ticket had been paid immediately, the paper said.

In addition, the plans aim to give more penalty points on offenders licences if they choose to defer the fine instead of settling it on the spot. For example, being caught talking on your cell phone will endorse your licence with one point on the spot, but with three points if the violation has to be determined in court.

Under the proposal, police officers would be able to offer an installment payment plan even for on-the-spot fines, whose upper limit is proposed to be raised well over the current 20,000 forints (EUR 74). An earlier proposal by ruling Fidesz party lawmakers had suggested a ceiling for fines of 100,000 forints (EUR 370), but that plan has been dropped.

Court procedures for traffic violations would be expedited to as short a period as five days within the offence in clear-cut cases, the paper said. The ruling could be made even in the absence of the suspect, although these can still be appealed, but at higher costs, if the defendant loses the case.

In 2009, Hungarian police initiated over 56,000 procedures against motorists with fines totalling 1.4 billion forints (EUR 5.2m), but could only collect 157 million forints, which suggests that tax office collection methods are not too effective, the paper said.

The proposal would introduce even more repercussions for motorists who re-offend within six months, it added.