Every year, deputies vote through an extension to the deadline for paying road tax for the year by two-and-a-half months. Instead of paying the following year’s road tax by December 31, car owners have until the middle of March to pay. Those who wait until March to pay, are in effect driving without road tax for January and February, which means they have no insurance cover for their car.

Technically speaking, this is illegal, although insurance companies play along and offer cover to cars in January and February even though they have not paid road tax. If the same car is involved in an accident in May, with the owner not having paid the road tax, the insurance company will pay nothing, because, legally, the car should not have been on the road.

This peculiarity, by which the whole system turns a blind eye for two months to the blatant illegality of cars being on the roads without paid road tax, has become an annual tradition. There is no rational justification for it, considering everyone knows that the road tax is up for renewal at the start of the year and should be prepared to pay it on time. A couple of weeks’ grace period could be given but anything more than that is a mockery.

Now, deputies have decided that fines for violations caught on traffic cameras are too high and have been turned into a revenue generation scheme by the government. As a ‘corrective’ measure they passed a law by which the deadline for payment of traffic fines would be nine months, three times longer than the original law stipulated. No rational explanation was given for this crude populism, which would make collection of fines much more difficult as it would create a big backlog. Perhaps this was the intention of the legislators.

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Last week they also passed a law stipulating the installing of timers at traffic lights in junctions at which there are cameras. This, they claimed, was necessary to warn drivers about when the red light would come on, so they would stop on time and avoid the fine! Is the amber light not adequate warning? Of course it is, not to mention that timers are incompatible with the traffic lights we have, according to the Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades, who, speaking on radio on Friday morning, said no country used timers which.

On the same show, Vafeades pointed out that the traffic cameras and steep fines had drastically reduced the number of offences. From May last year, he said, offences were reduced to 10 per cent of what they were – this was emphatic proof that the cameras and steep fines were effective in improving driving behaviour and making roads safer.

Deputies are the only people in Cyprus who refuse to accept this and are irresponsibly resisting government efforts to clamp down on bad driving habits and make our roads safer.