84 Road Deaths in Ten Months, 33 Fewer Than Last Year: Drivers Learned Where the Cameras Are, Now Police Cars Are Coming

Drivers in Macedonia learned one thing faster than any law: where the Safe City cameras are. In front of them they drive slowly, after them - however they like. That isn't the critics' claim, it's what Interior Minister Pance Toshkovski says: "Those who drive their vehicles irresponsibly have gradually learned the locations of the cameras."

The ministry's answer: from next year a large number of police vehicles will be able to detect a car driving faster than allowed, and the offence will be entered directly into the electronic system. "Now they won't be able to guess where the police cars will be," Toshkovski says.

The minister also has numbers to boast about. In the first ten months of this year 84 people died on the roads, compared with 117 in the first ten months of last year - 33 fewer, or a drop of about 28 percent. Over the past 35 years, according to him, an average of around 150 people a year died on Macedonian roads.

The new National Road Traffic Safety Strategy 2026-2030, a 145-page document, aims to halve the number of deaths by 2030 compared with 2024. The death rate here is higher than the European average of 44 deaths per million inhabitants. The ministry, meanwhile, is among the five institutions shortlisted for an award at the World Police Summit in Dubai.

At the launch of the strategy, professor Nikola Dujovski said roads must be built that protect citizens, so that people don't suffer because of construction flaws and inadequate documentation.

The drop is real, and every life saved counts. But when the minister himself admits drivers slow down only where they know they're being filmed, the question is whether habits have really changed or drivers have just learned a map. And how many of those 145 pages will be about the roads, not just the fines?