One policeman for 2,100 vehicles in Delhi
New Delhi,22 November: Delhi Traffic Police have only 5,000 personnel and all are overworked. This works out to just one policeman for every 2,100 vehicles – a horrendous ratio. The 90 lakh registered vehicles exclude the thousands which pass through Delhi every day from Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in particular. This is 300 times more than its road network and every day, some 1,400 new vehicles are registered in DelhiThis is present sceniero of capital traffic.How you can expect free traffic on the road? . Above all this Faulty road designs and rampant indiscipline by motorists are major factors that cause massive traffic jams in Delhi. Six-lane roads convert suddenly into four lanes at many places, resulting in bottlenecks. And people don’t follow the lane system and take shortcuts, creating more problems,”said a senoir cop of Delhi Traffic Police and majority of overstretched traffic police confermed this. Delhi’s road length is 33,000 km. Its vehicle population is much bigger compared with its road network, which creates massive traffic jams. The roads get choked at peak hours,”said a cop.
Delhi recorded 8,623 road accidents in 2014, up from 7,566 in 2013. Deaths on roads fell marginally from 1,778 in 2013 to 1,629 in 2014. This works out to four fatalities on roads daily. Joint commissioner traffic sandeep Goel blames faulty road designs and lack of lane discipline is one of the major problem. Public transport, particularly auto-rickshaws, cycle rickshaws and Grameen Seva taxis, end up clogging virtually all Delhi Metro stations. If any obstruction comes up, it creates more jams,” the officer says, citing wrong parking and vehicle breakdown, particularly of the heavy low floor Delhi Transport Corp (DTC) buses, as two major issues. “If a DTC bus breaks down, it affects the entire traffic because it can’t be towed away in the normal sense due to its bulk and a vacuum system that locks its wheels,” Goel said. Like many road experts, Goel says trucks coming into Delhi from other states are one of the key reasons for city’s pollution and traffic jams.”At night, trucks would speed up and do haphazard driving. For three to four months we tried to discipline them by deploying more men at night.”The traffic police issues challans to around 40,000 trucks at night this year.
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