Bengaluru will decongest further, improve ranking in next traffic index: Anucheth

Bengaluru: Bengaluru will be decongested further and its rankings in the list of the world’s most congested cities will improve this year, according to the traffic police boss. 

Bengaluru was placed sixth by the Dutch geolocation technology firm TomTom in the latest traffic index. This is an improvement as it was placed second in the previous index.

MN Anucheth, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), spoke at a seminar on road safety, organised by RASTA Center for Road Technology on Friday. 

He listed proactive enforcement measures, including e-paths for ambulances, collaborations with top players to reduce fatalities, turning interest towards traffic management by enforcing contactless fine systems, identifying blackspots and fixing them, among others. 

A Veeraragavan, retired professor of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; Dr Girish Chandra, Head of Forensic Department, MS Ramaiah Medical College; and Udaya Kumar L, a certified road safety auditor, were the other attendees. 

The speakers focused on education, engineering, enforcement and emergency care in road safety. Anucheth acknowledged the problems with ensuring a complete contactless fine system and said there was a need for an extensive plan and a collaborative effort involving RTOs and other agencies to make it seamless. 

Prof Veeraragavan called for adopting scientific methods to collect accidents and traffic-related data. He stressed that databases related to traffic should be centralised and easily accessible to people as well. 

Speaking about Road Safety Audits (RSA), he said, “Often, these audits are done after a road reports many fatalities. They should be carried out before a road is opened for vehicles.” 

Veeraragavan lamented that audits are often neither implemented nor employed. 

Dr Chandra focused on the importance of emergency care and autopsy units in ensuring road safety and said autopsy units should work in tandem with the police and identify the root cause of accidents. 

“As we identify reasons behind accidents, we are able to give police valuable inputs when there is a certain pattern in the accidents occurring in a particular jurisdiction, often helping discover black spots,” he said. 

M N Anucheth Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) inaugurates a seminar on road safety organised by RASTA Center for Road Technology in Bengaluru on Friday. DH PHOTO/B H Shivakumar