Rajahmundry: To ensure safe travel to commuters, teams of officials from road transport, police, roads and buildings and National Highway Authority of India will inspect nearly 300 km of National Highway-16 to find out lapses leading to accidents as part of the road safety audit programme in East, West Godavari and Krishna districts from August 8 to 31.
Officials in the rank of motor vehicle inspector in transport department, circle inspector or sub-inspector of police, divisional executive engineer or assistant executive engineer in R and B and NHAI and an assistant professor and two students from civil engineering of an engineering college will move as teams and inspect nearly 20 km stretch of road at a time. They will study road engineering, design, geometry and other critical elements including road managers or diverges, road intersections, road curves, over bridges and culverts, gaps in median, truck/bus lay-by, roadside industries/institutions and roadside pilgrim centres and weekly shandies and others. Apart from drivers’ mistake, poor road engineering with steep curves, high or low gradient and other factors contribute to road accidents. Though the authorities are installing boards along the national highway to alert drivers on accident prone areas, imposing curbs on speed limit, earmarking school/college zone and alerting about black spots, there is no great fall in the number of accidents.
The reason fo this is stated to be drivers neglecting road rules and driving beyond permitted speed limits. Though the number of accidents related to vehicles ramming against each other has come down, there have been severeal instances of vehicles hitting those in front due to speeding and others of vehicles ramming into vehicles parked on the road sides. West Godavari deputy transport commissioner S. Satyanarayana Murthy said, “The road safety audit will study various issues contributing to road accidents and suggest measures to rectify the lapses for safety of all.”
