With only four tow-away vehicles for the city provided by the Noida Authority, traffic cops are failing to enforce traffic rules and ensure a smooth ride. As a result, traffic even after peak hours crawls on the main city roads, forcing a nightmarish drive for thousands.
Besides limited number of vehicles and poor towing away mechanism, the traffic department does not even have adequate space to park and secure these towed away vehicles.
According to data provided by the Traffic Department about 5, 000 vehicles stay parked illegally on roads, whole day leading to massive jam and commuters sufferings. During peak hours, condition even goes from bad to worse. At present, the traffic police is capable of towing only five to six dozen vehicles daily while registration of vehicles has crossed over three lakh in Noida city.
“We can only tow away and safely park about 60 to 70 vehicles in a day in the whole of Noida. We need to have a capacity for about 2, 000 vehicles to properly carry out our enforcement drive for ensuring smooth vehicular movement on city roads,” said MP Singh, Superintendent of Police (Traffic), Gautambudh Nagar.
Acute shortage of space to keep towed vehicle is another hurdle for Noida Traffic police. There is only one place in Sector 18 having capacity of 60-70 vehicles has been allotted near Atta Market by the Noida Authority. “We only have little space in Sector 18 to park about 60 to 70 towed away vehicles. But if we tow away a vehicle in far away area like sector 62 or sector 56, then we will have to bring that vehicle again to sector 18 because we do not have any space at other place,” he said.
A senior official of Noida Authority said that they are well concerned with the space crunch in the city. “We are planning to allot enough space to law enforcement agency so they could park towed away vehicles conveniently. We are planning to increase number of tow away vehicles so we could free roads of the city from illegal parking,” said Sandeep Chandra, in-charge of Noida Traffic Cell.