KOLKATA: With the year drawing to a close, Lalbazar has started its annual accident survey. A crucial part of the exercise will be the identification of black spots — denoting the city’s most accident-prone zones. Sources said that though this has been one of the safest years , with only a fraction of accidents occurring during the lockdown, 14 fatal accidents recorded since November have the cops on their toes.
Among the prime spots under scanner are stretches lying on some of the longest roads of the city — BT Road, Diamond Harbour Road, EM Bypass and AJC Bose Road. The list is usually finalized by the first month of the year. The city presently has 20-22 such spots based on the findings from 2019, said an officer.
“There are several aspects that make a spot ‘black’. The most important being a zone of 150m-300m metres that has witnessed multiple accidents, including fatal ones. We are now looking into four areas that can be changed to make such stretches safer — methods of pedestrian movement, changing traffic signal cycles, making necessary lane markings and evaluating if road dividers or multiple manually operated barriers can stop people from illegally coming on to the road,” said an officer, adding that identifying such spots was a dynamic process.
Fifteen out of 70 police stations in Kolkata — roughly a little more than 20% of the entire city area — contributed to the bulk of all fatal crashes in the city this year, claimed sources. In 2019, the same 15 police station areas had contributed to more than 35% of the accidents and around 42% in 2018. The police said that a couple of stretches around Chingrighata and on Basanti Highway are likely to be dropped out, while the Ekbalpore crossing and BT Road (in Cossipore) is likely to be included in the list.
“As accidents were fewer this year and spread across the city, we are studying each accident individually and have called for a report from both the local traffic guard and the fatal squad that investigates such cases,” said a senior IPS officer at Lalbazar. Primary enquiries have found fault with the basic traffic sense of both pedestrians and bikers — with both being unaware of the blind spots of large vehicles.
The police said that with this year setting new records in road safety, the National Crime Records Bureau found Kolkata to be the safest city in terms of accidents per lakh population for two consecutive two years among all megacities of India. Historically, Kolkata has witnessed maximum accidents at the onset of winters. The period between October and December is considered to be the worst in terms of road safety. Last year, 638 of the total of 2,068 accidents (both fatal and non-fatal), occurred in these months with October, November and December recording 222, 214 and 202 accidents respectively.