A staggering 110 million violations of traffic rules are committed by motorised vehicles alone every day in Delhi. Of these, 30 million are forced due to faulty traffic engineering system.

The figures were revealed by a study carried out by the Institute of Road Traffic Education’s Center for Analysis & Research in Road Safety.

As per the study, 102 million “running” violations— that directly affect road safety— are committed per day in the Capital, with two-wheelers taking the lead at 50 million violations and cars at over 22 million violations daily.

Of these, 30 million violations are caused due to faulty traffic engineering and the brunt is borne by two-wheeler drivers with 16 million violations per day. Buses commit 3.75 million violations due to faulty road engineering while for cars the figure stands at 7.54 lakh.

“The study was conducted for a month’s time between September and October 2005, and the report has recently been submitted to the Delhi Police. All major roads like the Ring Road, outer ring road and arterial roads were surveyed. Intersections and bus stops were also part of the study,” said Rohit Baluja, president, IRTE.

There’s more bad news. As per a referral survey report by the Indian Medical Association, 45 per cent of those found driving at night were under the influence of alcohol. There are about 15 lakh helmet violations per day and 10 lakh of them are for using cell phone while driving.

Other violations range from not using seat belt, overspeeding, overtaking at intersections, not yielding right of way at junction to using defective registration number plates, wrong parking, misuse of horns and head lamps at night.

And who bears the brunt of the everyday traffic violations most? The pedestrians— of the 1,800 average fatalities in the Capital per year, 42 per cent are pedestrians, 11 per cent are cyclists and one per cent are two-wheeler riders.

Meanwhile, Additional CP, Delhi Traffic Police, M.S. Upadhyaya, says these traffic violations are being checked.

“IRTE submitted the report to us sometime back. We have gone through the report. The traffic police is doing its utmost to check violations with the manpower available. We issue almost 10,000 challans per day. The report itself says that enforcement alone is not the solution, the entire road culture has to be changed and proper traffic engineering needs to be in place,” says Upadhyaya.

Survey methodology: Average number of kilometers travelled by different modes of transport has been calculated through daily passenger trips and occupancy. The IRTE team recorded the number of violations per km through camera surveys.

By: Anubhuti Vishnoi
Date: Sunday , February 05, 2006
Source: http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=168445

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