HYDERABAD: The need for speed can kill you and very often it does. Speeding is said to account for over a third of all road deaths. There’s no speed management nor is there a specified speed limit within the city. Road safety activists say this is the main cause for the rising road accidents.
Speeding is one of the major causes for road accidents on the Outer Ring
road, a study by Central Road Research Institute of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research said. According to the ‘Case Study: Traffic Analysis and Road Accidents in
Hyderabad using Geographic Information System (GIS)’, there has been an upward trend in road accidents in Hyderabad over the past few years. GIS helps in locating the accident hotspots and also in analysing the trend of road accidents in Hyderabad.
As many as 40,690 drivers were booked for overspeeding in 2016 and the offenders paid up Rs1.62 crore. This year, 8,787 cases have been booked till the end of April, and drivers penalised Rs 35 lakh.
Mr Raymond Peter, former transport commissioner, ascribed the high number of road deaths due to lax regulations and poor traffic sense. “In our country the traffic sense is poor, mostly due to low levels of education and poor levels of regulation. There are very few speed limit boards and no space left for pedestrians. A majority of accidents occur when pedestrians are knocked down while drivers are driving at a high speed. This has become a common phenomenon in the city’’.
“To avoid this,” he continued, “patrolling should be increased. Laser guns, speed guns and speed limit boards should be installed and licencing should not be made easy. In the West, getting a driver’s licence can be as difficult as getting a passport. Strict enforcement and increase of fines can help — if the fine is too low, offenders have no problem paying after violating traffic laws’’.
