Traffic Rules to Be Amended with Electronic Road Signs and Truck Distance Regulations

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The Russian government plans to amend the traffic rules to adapt the regulatory framework to modern technologies and combat one of the deadliest types of accidents. According to Kommersant, the package of instructions approved by the road safety commission envisages several innovations.

The main change is the mandatory status for instructions on electronic road signs and information display panels (IDPs). Currently, drivers are mainly only recommended to follow their instructions (for example, reduce speed due to icy conditions). After the amendments to the traffic rules, the requirements on the panels will have priority over stationary signs. This will allow synchronizing IDPs with photo and video surveillance cameras and start automatically fining for their violation. Thousands of such constructions have already been installed in Russia, but their potential for operational traffic management and increased safety has not yet been fully realized.

The Ministry of Transport has been instructed to study the feasibility of introducing a minimum distance between trucks on two-lane roads. The initiative is aimed at reducing the number of head-on collisions during overtaking: often drivers, starting a maneuver, do not have time to return to their lane due to a long "string" of trucks going with a small gap. During the first 11 months of 2025, accidents related to driving on the oncoming lane in permitted places took thousands of lives. Technically, such a violation can be fixed by modern cameras with neural networks, but the issue of administrative application of the norm requires detailed consideration.

To combat unjustified "speed bumps" in the form of sudden speed reductions, a unified regulation for setting speed limits will be developed. Currently, the decision is made by road owners or regions, which often leads to chaos and contradictory signs. The unification of rules will become the basis for a large-scale inventory of all existing restrictions on highways. Experts do not rule out that the next topic after establishing order may be a review of the "non-fineable" threshold for speeding by 20 km/h.

In parallel, the Ministry of Transport and Rosavtodor should prepare a plan for equipping roads with dividing barriers and additional lanes until 2036. To date, only a quarter of federal highways have such means of protection against head-on collisions.