Now, blue-prints to address City traffic problems

Now, blue-prints to address City traffic problems
Vijay Times

With increasing chaos and congestion on City roads, traffic police have embarked on preparing short-term and long-term action plans to significantly improve the situation.

The traffic police are in consultation with local traffic area management members and have also invited public suggestions regarding the plans. The plan, with diagrams and sketches would help officers transferred to the new police stations in drawing solutions to the problems in their jurisdictions.

Schemes for pedestrian safety, model road concepts and road safety initiatives are some of the points being focussed on.

A team of students from a Citybased engineering college with the help of the traffic police are creating sub-division-wise data base on the volume of traffic on each road and details on parking, length and width of roads, bottle necks, accidentprone spots, signals and their manufacturers, road humps, threat from trees, phone numbers of officebearers of residents welfare organisations with addresses, and emergency services.

The created data base will be printed and circulated to residents to involve them in the planning.

The plans include conducting periodic meetings with Bangalore Mahanagar Palike, BESCOM, BWSSB and local residents to solve traffic related problems and receive feed backs.

The plans focus on improving the lighting system for better visibility at night for motorists as well as pedestrians. In doing so, the traffic police plan to add more street lights by reducing the gaps between them to 50 feet from the present 100 feet.

As part of the plans, traffic inspectors will identify unsafe stretches of roads to convert them into accident-free, model roads with stress on safety. The same would apply to bottlenecks, footpaths, lane markings, signboards, roadside illumination, medians and their grills.

Stress would be on lane discipline and enforcement, and provision of bus bays wherever the road is adjacent to available land for such expansion.

M N Sreehari, chairman, Traffic Engineers and Safety Trainers (TEST) and also the States traffic advisor, said whatever the plan, the financial allocations should come simultaneously to ensure they do not remain just cupboard plans.

He suggested these plans be taken on specific time-frames by constituting an authority which could act independent of the government.