“We are preparing terms of reference for the audit and are planning safety audits of existing roads to identify and remove engineering defects that often cause accidents,” said Vijay Singhal, additional municipal commissioner.Written by Sanjana Bhalerao
A proposed safety audit by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation will look into accident-prone zones, safety designs and traffic schemes of all arterial and minor roads of the city. A consultant will also analyse the design of new roads and capacity of existing ones.
The move came in the wake of a Supreme Court order that was passed a year ago to check rising number of accidents and deaths on state highways and other roads by removing engineering defects in the planning stage.
“We are preparing terms of reference for the audit and are planning safety audits of existing roads to identify and remove engineering defects that often cause accidents,” said Vijay Singhal, additional municipal commissioner.
“The purpose of the plan is to reduce the number of road accidents and fatalities. The state governments and Union Territories are, therefore, directed to urgently prepare a road safety action plan by March 2018,” the SC had stated on November 30, 2017, while hearing a writ petition. This is not the first time that the BMC has undertaken a road safety initiative. Besides mass media campaigns and road safety sessions in schools, the civic body had also planned to geotag accident spots in the city. However, the project never took off.
Under an agreement signed between chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and Michael Bloomberg, the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety was started in 2015. Since the initiative began, road crash deaths have reduced by 20 per cent from 611 in 2015 to 490 in 2017. This year, a decline of around 17 per cent has been recorded as compared to last year.
