The city roads are inviting the errant commuters offering them the “enjoyment and thrill” of crushing flat the fragile plastic ‘dividers’. They ply unpunished. This is true in every sense on Ranchi - mind you the capital city - roads with plasticised dividers.
Installing dividers on roads aims at ensuring lane driving. This is, in general done by stretching cemented concrete dividers on roads. But in Ranchi one comes across plastic dividers. They call it delineators. These delineators are formed by a number of plastic poles - around 3 feet in height – installed on roads.
Such ‘plastic dividers’ leave the concepts of lane driving, disciplined driving on the mercy of errant drivers – which are huge in numbers in city. In two months- before June 17- the traffic police collected Rs. 25 lakhs as fine from traffic rule violators.
These plastic poles are vulnerable to be run flat by any vehicle– small or big intentionally or non-intentionally. The poles – lying – flat specter is visible invariably in every road since such plastic-dividers are all pervasive.
With the delineators lying flat lanes stand merged into each other. Auto-rickshaws, bikers, manual rickshaws have the liberty of having U-turn, right turn at will and whims. No lanes for ‘thelawalas’, no demarcated places for parking.
“This causes a lot of problem. I admit it. There has to be lanes for lane driving. We need to have such infrastructures if we want traffic situation to improve,” traffic SP Rajeev Ranjan Singh said. The traffic SP claimed that he had raised the issue at various levels. In a meeting with the Ranchi DC also last month this issue was raised.
“We had requested them to replace the delineators with concrete dividers. I have also written to the Raj Bala Verma – road construction department Principal Secretary. They have all agreed to me in principle. But nothing is seen on roads,” the SP laments. He also explained why permanent dividers are financially more viable than plastic delineators.
“While the cost of installing a delineator comes around Rs. 1,000 (which means you have to spend nearly a crore in installing delineators in the city) whereas the entire cost of replacing thousands of these plastic poles with concrete dividers will come just around 4-5 lakhs,” the SP said.
In the meeting with the traffic police last month Ranchi district administration had agreed to replace these delineators. But instead of replacing these delineators with permanent dividers mowed down delineators are being replaced by new delineators. Examples are seen at Kishori Yadav Chowk