A surveillance camera on Noi Bai-Lao Cai Expressway. Photo by VnExpress/Son Hai. 

A VND2.15 trillion ($93 million) project has been launched to install traffic surveillance cameras on all national highways and expressways in the country. 

Approved Wednesday by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, the project will be implemented from now until 2025, using state budget, private investment and other funding sources.

Details on the number of cameras and their specific locations have not been revealed.

The project will be divided into three major parts.

Part one, costing VND850 billion, will set up cameras in different localities and build a center for storing and managing data collected from all the cameras. The Traffic Police Department under the Ministry of Public Security will be the main investor for this part.

The remaining two parts will have the municipal departments in the biggest cities of Hanoi and HCMC set up new cameras and upgrade existing ones, apart from establishing data management centers.

For these two cities, the surveillance system will have added software to warn of traffic jam zones and identify vehicles for supervision such as those that are stolen or involved in hit and run accidents.

Traffic police in both cities will be provided with tablets to serve their street patrol and accident investigation functions.

The Traffic Police Department last October proposed a plan to increase reliance on surveillance cameras to detect violations and only head to the streets in person when necessary.

Under the proposal, traffic police officers will show up on the streets only to handle violations that cannot be detected by watching CCTV footage, like driving under the influence or trucks carrying more weight than allowed.

Once the plan takes effect, the police will only have the duty of patrolling the streets occasionally, regulating traffic on special occasions, handling traffic jams and dealing with traffic accidents, the department said.

The government has approved the proposal and requested that from now on, contractors and investors are required to add a surveillance camera system on the expressway projects they are in charge of, a regulation that has never been applied before.

Vietnam currently has more than 60 expressways and almost 130 national highways, but very few are equipped with surveillance cameras.