Chandigarh has always been notorious for its fatal road accidents, however, efforts put in by the city traffic police has resulted into a steep decline in cases of fatal road accidents.
According to the data provided by the Traffic Department, there have been only 114 cases of fatal accidents in the year 2013 as compared to 130, in the year 2102. For the year 2104 only 42 fatal accident cases has been reported till date.
Even the numbers of person injured in a traffic accident and the numbers of person killed during a traffic accident has dwindled since the year 2011. Manish Chaudhury, SSP Traffic attributed this success to the four pronged strategy of four Es adopted by the traffic cops, which has helped in bringing down the number of traffic accidents.
The four E’ commences of education, engineering changes, emergency care and enforcement. As for education the traffic police have been constantly trying to make the people aware fatal road accidents, which can be the result of minor fault in part of both the victim and an accused in a traffic accident.
The awareness program in which the Traffic department made it mandatory for the violators to watch the videos of fatal road accident captured in the CCTV camera placed in various traffic signal junctions within the city, has helped a lot to educate the people about how minor traffic violations may result in death and in turn had brought the cases of fatal road accidents down.
Also the constant effort by the engineering cell to analyse the cause of accidents and do ground surveys on basis of it has helped in tweaking the existing traffic infrastructure to accommodate the ever increasing traffic load on the city roads. In this attempt there have been few sweet and other sour experiences, with the experiments done, but as a whole it has helped the traffic cell to better understand and analyse the cause of accidents at certain accident prone zone.
A traffic cop deployed at Sector 26 said, “It is not only the responsibility of the police but the citizens also should abide by traffic laws to keep the accidents at bay.”
However, a look at the reports published by the traffic police clearly indicates that the denizens of the city have failed to play their role properly in helping the city with a free and smooth flow of traffic by avoiding accidents.
The data clearly indicates that drunken driving and driving without helmet tops the list. If compared, there were 4,679 drunken driving cases in 2011 and in 2012 around 4,676 people were booked under this offense, which clearly indicates that people are still not serious about their own safety. In the current year 1,473 cases has been registered till now for drunken driving which is quite alarming in a city where cops are always on their toes to book the tipplers. The city hospital keeps on getting cases of fatal accidents in which most of the victims are diagnosed with severe head injury, but all the awareness programmes has failed to open the eyes of the people because as compared to 2011 when 39,156 offenders were booked for driving without helmet, their numbers has steadily increased to 44,601 in 2013, which clearly indicates that more efforts are to be taken by the motorist to avoid fatal accidents.