Soon every fatal road accident in Delhi will go through a scientific investigation within three months to zero in area-specific traffic problems and road engineering defects that may have caused it, as per the state’s first road safety policy. The ‘Delhi Road Safety Policy’ approved by state transport minister Kailash Gahlot on Friday, wants the police, transport department and road operators to reduce accidents and fatalities by 30% by 2020 and by 80% by 2025. As soon as the policy is notified, the transport department would set up a special teams at the state and district levels to conduct scientific accident investigations using simulation techniques. The policy mandates training every two years for all officials starting from junior engineers to chief engineers and police officers.
Speaking on this, K Ravinder, an official in the transport planning division of the Central Road Research Institutesaid, “The problem is there is no capacity-building workshops because of which the expertise that the police has is not shared by government road engineers and vice versa. Every officer involved in building and maintaining roads and traffic needs holistic training at regular intervals.”
He also added, “The policy is something which many states have, but was missing in Delhi. Once notified, it will be mandatory for road owning agencies and traffic police to digitise the database of all black spots in the city and check their real-time status. The list of such spots along with accident-prone areas will have to be updated every six months on the basis of severity.”
The policy will be put up in the public domain this week for feedback, he said.
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As per the road safety policy, agencies will have to conduct anti-encroachment drives to clear carriageways and pedestrian walkways, where one such drive was conducted on Friday on stretches of the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road, Andheria Mod and Chirag Dilli were removed by the south district administration.