Tragedy on Sparrow Hills
The accident, which became the reason for new questions to the system of capital car sharing, occurred on the evening of April 13 in the Sparrow Hills. Behind the wheel of a rented Mercedes was the grandson of the former first vice-president of AvtoVAZ, 19-year-old Yegor Lyachenkov. Departing from the police chase, he drove to the intersection at the “red” at great speed and rammed Hyundai, driven by 22-year-old MMA fighter Baila Kurbanmedov.
The blow fell right on the driver's door of a Korean foreign car - the athlete died on the spot. Also a 17-year-old Mercedes passenger got a broken arm. Lyachenkov himself was not injured. He refused a medical examination. It also turned out that he did not have a driver's license.
Now a young man who managed to unlearn at a driving school, but did not pass the examinations in the traffic police, faces imprisonment for a term of two to seven years, the court sent him under arrest.
During the trial, it turned out that he was able to rent a Mercedes thanks to the account of 24-year-old Lyudmila Knutova. According to "KP", the girl really uses car sharing, but in the company Anytime, which owned the broken Mercedes, she did not have an account.
It turned out that several years ago she published photos of her driver's license online. In addition, she took a mobile phone on credit, and the salon manager took a photo of her along with her passport on her own phone, explaining that the camera in the computer was not working. Further, the fraudsters, by combining these data, were able to get an account in the name of Knutova and sold it through the Internet to Lyachenko. In connection with this, the young man may now face even more charges of hijacking.
The company Anytime, which owned the broken Mercedes, declined to comment after the incident.
From the moment it appeared in 2013 in the capital of car sharing, by the way, the first operator at that time was just Anytime company - there were quite a few resonant accidents involving the cars provided for short-term rent. Similar incidents happened to those who, like Lyachenkov, had no right to be at the wheel at all. For example, in January 2018, a 17-year-old schoolboy, having bought a valid account through Telegram, was able to rent a car and went skiing with friends. The car skidded, it turned upside down, as a result, three teenagers were in the hospital.
Car-sharing companies try to solve the problem of user authentication in different ways, but neither huge fines nor additional methods of verifying their identity help to completely avoid transferring the account to third parties.
Regulatory Issues
Metropolitan Traffic Police more and more often purposefully stops the drivers of rented cars, checking who actually rented a car. But large-scale checks to correct the situation do not help.
“With car sharing, of course, many questions arise. One of the main problems is that in such a car can not sit at all those persons who are registered in the database of the operator. Or not in the condition that is permissible under the terms of traffic safety. Carsharing should be developed so that it is possible to uniquely identify a person who gets into the car, ”Mikhail Chernikov, head of the traffic police of Russia, said in an interview with RIA Novosti in February of this year.
- © Agency of urban news "Moscow"
According to him, a mandatory scan of a potential driver’s face can help solve the problem, which will allow verifying it with the database. At the same time, Chernikov noted that the ministry is considering ways to increase control over car sharing. “Because if you do not control this process at all, of course, there may be negative consequences,” he said.
After the accident on Sparrow Hills, the need to take additional measures to authenticate car sharing users was also discussed in the State Duma.
Vasily Vlasov, a deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, addressed the Minister of Transport of the Russian Federation, Yevgeny Dietrich, proposing that cameras be equipped with cameras to identify the driver.
“I consider it expedient to develop a draft law providing greater safety from people who are not allowed to drive or who are deprived of the right to drive a vehicle. One of such measures could be the obligatory requirement to install a camera inside a vehicle provided under the car sharing system to identify the person receiving the vehicle, ”wrote Vlasov.
He noted that this sphere “suffers because of a lack of legal regulation”, which often leads to tragic consequences.
“In the overwhelming majority of cases, a car-sharing vehicle is booked through a mobile application, which leads to situations where individuals, either without the right to drive, or under the influence of alcohol can get a vehicle,” said Vlasov.
Another State Duma deputy, Valery Afonsky, believes that all car sharing vehicles must be equipped with alcocks that would prevent drunk drivers from accessing them.
"Not a massive one"
However, the operators themselves point out that the problem of access to third-party machines is not a massive and most pressing one. About this, in particular, RT told the representative of the company BelkaCar Ekaterina Makarova.
“This phenomenon is not massive, the proportion of such trips is extremely small. The problem of fixing every contact of a machine with other machines or objects is much more urgent. There are not so many major accidents, more often there are damages, scratches, and it is not always possible to determine the originator of their occurrence, ”she said.
According to Makarova, car sharing companies are serious about the process of registering users.
“When registering, we ask you to take a selfie in real time, you cannot just take it, attach some homeless documents and register. Still, the security service rejects 20% of applications, ”she noted.
A company representative believes that installing cameras in a car will not completely solve the problem.
“This problem is not solved in principle. If you now register with us according to your documents, go downstairs and put you in a car, say, a terrorist, then how can a company protect against this? It is impossible to track down if you have “clean” documents and there are no sins for the soul, ”Makarova added.
She believes that the existing agreement in Moscow between the authorities and car sharing operators is quite comprehensive, but she believes that federal regulation could help operators develop business in the regions.
- © Agency of urban news "Moscow"
“In Moscow there is a full-fledged law, he clearly prescribes our relationship with the authorities. A federal law can help a transparent parish in other cities. There can sit an adequate boss, and maybe not adequate. Therefore, the general rules would make this business more predictable. As far as I know, there are no serious steps in this direction yet, but Kazan has recently adopted its law, it is largely copied from Moscow. ”
RT sent an official request to the Department of Transport, but at the time of publication, the answer to it never came.
Expert opinion
“The problem of access to cars is solved by each operator separately, but in reality it lies on a different level. If we take specifically Lyachenkov, then in this case he used car sharing, if you call things by their right names, as a tool for murder. And this tool could be anything: a hijacked car, a friend's car, etc. Here, in general, there is a problem with a feeling of permissiveness and impunity, ”said Yury Nikolayev, the founder of the Trushering site.
According to him, it is actually quite difficult to buy a valid foreign account to use a short-term lease.
“The operators themselves are well over all of this. Over the past two years, we tried to do this as an experiment, but almost always ran into scammers who, after taking the money, did not provide anything, or their data simply did not work, ”the expert says.
According to Nikolaev, the situation often happens when one person transfers the data of his account to another voluntarily or unintentionally.
- © Agency of urban news "Moscow"
“If we talk about voluntary data transfer, then almost nothing can be done here. One person himself gave the other data, and how to protect the operators here is not at all clear. One can try to do something, but such measures should be regulated by law, ”the expert believes.
According to him, more or less reliable methods can create inconvenience for customers and are fraught with increased costs, so most companies are unlikely to go to them voluntarily.
“You can make a personal presence at the office at check-in or the total installation of cameras in the cabin. To fix the driver’s face during each rental, verify it with the help of a neural network or operators with a database and, if everything is in order, give access to the car. This should be done by law. Only two operators set up the camera voluntarily - Yandex.Drive and Matresh Car. They did it for themselves as a measure of security, ”said the expert.
He believes that it is necessary to refine and tighten the legislation on transferring cars to third parties, so that the person who initially took the car and then handed it over to someone was criminalized for the hijacking.
At the same time, Nikolaev confirmed Makarova’s words that, despite a number of resonant cases, in the companies themselves they believe that there is no problem of access to outsiders' cars as such.
“We often communicate with operators, and everyone unanimously says that they are much more concerned about the theft or registration of an accident, but not this. The problem is quite private and they talk about it when something resonant happens. The rogue will crawl everywhere and always, so there is a problem in the mentality and not in car sharing as such, ”he said.
The coordinator of the Blue Pails community, Piotr Shkumatov, considers the problem of access to car sharing vehicles to be one of the main problems of this industry, and not only in Russia.
“How to reliably identify a person? Unfortunately, no way. Some kind of biometrics, but it's still tomorrow. There are no reliable systems that will recognize a person’s identity on the basis of a photo or video, or they are very specific, ”he said.
- © Agency of urban news "Moscow"
According to him, fraudsters can easily get selfies of people and use them to their advantage.
“Recently, a person who registered on the American cryptocurrency exchange, suddenly, without knowing it, turned out to be a user of Moscow car sharing. When we send our selfies to someone, one cannot be sure that they will not be merged somewhere, ”says Shkumatov.
He believes that traffic police officers should be given additional powers to regulate this area.
“Now the traffic police inspector stops and asks to show the mobile application, but now no one is obliged to show him the application, only the documents on the car and the rights. That is, users can skip the lease agreement. A person can say that his phone has sat down, this often happens. And what to do? All this must be thought out and adjusted, and it is necessary taking into account the position of the operators themselves, ”Shkumatov is sure.
He believes that the rules of the game need to be changed throughout the country and need to begin now, because the process can take a lot of time.
“We need a federal law on car rental, so that it concerns not only car sharing. Because now the usual rental offices can not count on benefits from the metropolitan government, for example, free parking, but in fact, how are they worse? This is the same car sharing, only rent is longer. This is pure discrimination, ”Shkumatov summed up.
In late April, the vice-mayor of Moscow, Maxim Liksutov, said that there are now about 18,000 car sharing vehicles in the city, which is the second largest figure in the world after Tokyo. By the end of the year, their number may increase to 25 thousand, and by the end of 2020 - up to 30 thousand. But this is not the limit, and in the coming years, according to Liksutov, the number of cars in carsharing can grow to 50-60 thousand.