Chennai: Next time a bus breaks down on your route to office or a road roko has stalled traffic for hours on a particular road, you don’t have to depend on updates through radio or luck forbid, learn it after reaching the place. You can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth as Chennai City police introduced an additional twitter account for live traffic updates.
The account, ChennaiTrafficAlert (@CC_TrafficAlert) went live from Friday posting updates about traffic movement in various parts of the city. This account would be functioning in additional to the existing twitter account of the Chennai City Traffic Police (@cctpolice). “It has been introduced on a trial basis. We would gauge the response and would go about a functional plan to run the account in the coming days,” a senior traffic police officer said.
For now, the existing team, which is handling the social media accounts of the City police, is handling the additional account too, the officer added. Traffic marshals in the city would alert the control room about any situation such as slow movement of vehicles or a road roko, which would be updated in this account for the public’s perusal, police said. On the frequency of updates, another traffic police officer told DC they have not formulated any mandate as of now, but are considering giving traffic updates every hour or two. The additional twitter account has a meagre 376 followers while the mother twitter account has over 17,000 followers on twitter.
When it comes to social media presence, Chennai police has a long way to catch up with their counterparts in other metros. Bengaluru traffic police’s twitter account, which is quite active, has over 3.5 lakh followers while Mumbai Police has over 30 lakh followers.
