Hanoi police has begun sending penalty charge notice to owners of illegally parked car.

This move aims to help the city’s police deal with the rampant traffic safety violations and enforcing the traffic law in the city.

Hanoi police check and attach penalty notice on illegal-parking cars. Photo: Kinhtedothi.vn

Five years ago, Hanoi began installing video surveillance cameras on streets to detect traffic offenses and send penalty notice to offenders. The measure has contributed to improving drivers’ behavior.

Hanoi is home to nearly 10 million people and more than 6 million vehicles, while there are only about 1,000 traffic police in charge of patrolling and handling traffic offenses. Lack of traffic police has been blamed for difficulties in ensuring traffic safety and order for such a megacity as Hanoi.

Putting a penalty notice on the windshield of illegal-parking cars has been a common practice in many countries. Now, Hanoi police are allowed to attach a penalty notice in a car in the absence of driver after documenting the offense.

In this way, police officers are not required no hand the penalty notice directly to the driver, send the notice to car owners’ home or tow the vehicle if not necessary.

With the rampant traffic violation in Hanoi, this solution also helps to curb bribe, ensuring fairness and transparency of the law enforcement. Therefore, people’s law abiding sense will be significantly improved.

For a long time, illegal parking, considered to be one of the main reasons behind serious traffic congestion in Hanoi, seems to be an intractable problem, with increasing numbers of cars, poor infrastructure and lack of public awareness.

According to Hanoi police, 3,238 parking violations occurred in September which was Vietnam’s Traffic Safety month, accounting for 12.42% of total traffic violations.

More than 1,800 cases have already been sanctioned in just the first 15 days of this month, the police said, adding that the real figure could be higher.