The gnarly gridlock of traffic in Bengaluru could have cost you the opening scene of a newly released movie or the introductory session of an important meeting many a time. But have you ever been on the other side of the scene when you had to negotiate the life of a dear one inside the ambulance with a dim-witted and confused motorist or cab driver in front of you?
The flawed traffic etiquette among ooreans is cited to be the major reason for this crisis and a city-based organisation is planning to bring about an impact through demo drive and awareness campaigns that will be conducted at the Jayanagar signal next month. Along with the traffic police personnel, the volunteers of GiveWay foundation will conduct a demo drive with ambulances.
“Ideally, you are supposed to move towards the right side of the road when you see an ambulance behind. But mostly people don’t care or they are confused about what to do. Our demo session will be more or less a tutorial on how to react when there is an ambulance behind you. We have also planned to facilitate few ambulance drivers and organise a human chain with around 200 school and college students,’’ says Meenakshi Ravikrishna, a volunteer. Death does strike aboard the ambulance and every year hundreds of people die en route the hospital because of the time lapse in shifting the patient from one place to another amid traffic snarls. Even when there are good Samaritans who try and give way for the ambulance, there comes a trail of merciless motorists making use of the space created by the ambulance, paving way for an impending traffic mess.
“With this motive, we are going to observe every third Saturday of the month as “GiveWay day” to create awareness among the people across the city,’’ says Suresh Kumar, founder of the GiveWay foundation. Sheshadri BN, who was a consultant for the emergency vehicle traffic pre-emption system, says that the lack of coordination between the government and police officials is the main reason why the problem remains unresolved despite of sustainable solutions available at their disposal.
“In 2014, we had worked on an emergency vehicle traffic pre-emption project where the traffic signals will be installed with a GPS system that will decode the ambulance and fire rescue vehicle siren and automatically change the signal to green. The project got cleared in the cabinet and even technically it got approved, but only because of the laxity of certain higher officials we are not able to deploy the system in our traffic signals. We had also done a trial run in two major signals in the city and it went successfully,’’ said Sheshadri.
Meanwhile, giving way for the ambulance has always been a helpless and futile affair for many commuters like Sachin Tantry. “Last week, I was in the Raghavendra Swamy Mutt signal and there was an ambulance behind. The ambulance came with a siren but then every single vehicle on the road started honking. The sound was so loud that the vehicles on the front row could not even hear the sound of the ambulance siren. Most of the times, even when we want to help, we are just helpless,” says Sachin who is a public policy expert.
