Look who’s watching!

Look who’s watching!
Bengaluru,


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The introduction of gizmos to book traffic violators has seen a 100 per cent jump in the number of violations booked and fines collected. However, Ambarish B. and Amit S. Upadhye find that only awareness of rules and equipment can stop lawbreakers


You may not see them, but they are watching you. Hidden cameras at traffic junctions are picking up offences which would otherwise have been missed, giving the police more ammunition than before to fine drivers and bring them to book
The traffic police has stepped into the world of gizmos in other ways too, allowing it to curb traffic violations over a bigger chunk of the city and keep tabs on more commuters
Enforcement and junction cameras flash hundreds of violations every hour onto
screens manned by the police. The result has been a huge jump in the number of recorded violations and in fine collection
“Violations have always existed. But use of modern equipment has helped us book more offenders. Both the number of violations and the fine collection has seen a 100 per cent rise in the last few months,” says additional commissioner of police (traffic) Pravin Sood. Over speeding is heading to the top position among the list of offences drivers are being hauled up for after advanced cameras were placed on
interceptor vehicles to check the practice. Signal jumping, dangerous driving and riding two wheelers without helmets are among the other common violations people are finding themselves in the dock for
While 19 lakhs cases were booked in 2007 against traffic offenders, the number of such cases is expected to cross 30 lakh in 2009. The fine collection has risen to Rs 3 crore from Rs 1.9 crore in 2007
Cases against close to 9 lakh offenders have already been booked as on May 31 this year, while in the whole of last year 17 lakh offenders had fallen into the police
net. But if the police is congratulating itself on its eagle eye approach to traffic offences paying off, traffic experts are not entirely convinced its going about the right way in making sure traffic is orderly on the roads
In their view it is not enough to merely catch the offenders, but to also make sure that they don’t repeat the violations they are caught for. “Detection of traffic violations may have gone up after the modern gizmos were introduced in the city
But most of the devices are either limited to certain traffic corridors or are not noticed by the commuters. It is important for the cameras to be visible at the junctions to put a scare into drivers and stop them from violating the law. Given the fact that signal jumping is a major traffic violation in Bengaluru, more awareness about the devices being in place could prove a deterrent,” says traffic expert M N Srihari
But no one has any quarrel with the easier mode of paying fines introduced by the police at BangaloreOne centres and other places, which has helped in pushing up the collection from offenders