Wreckage of a car after collision. PTI
New Delhi: At least five people were reported dead and several injured after a speeding car rammed into three other stationary cars and an ambulance on the Bandra-Worli sea link in Mumbai in the small hours of Wednesday.
The over-speeding car pummelled the stationary cars parked on sthe side of the road at around 3:30 am on Wednesday when the ambulance was preparing to take victims of an earlier accident to hospital.
But, this is not the first time that a freak accident has caused loss of lfe and limb on the high-speed motorway.
Speaking to Firstpost, road safety and transport expert Sarika Panda Bhatt, explained why the Bandra-Worli sea-link in Mumbai is prone to accidents, and what steps and measures can be taken to bring down the number of accidents and casualties.
‘Low-speed, not high-speed expressways needed’
“Any high speed corridor in a city is prone to accidents because it is not designed the way it should be designed. We can’t keep on building high-speed corridors inside a city. We only focus on peak hour-traffic and design the roads. Most of these accidents happen in no-peak hours, where people tend to speed. We need to design slow-speed roads.”
She pointed out that more than 400 people are killed everyday on the roads in India, and every accident is just brushed aside as ‘one more accident’. “First of all, it’s not an accident; it’s an incident. It happens due to poor engineering and someone’s mistake,” Panda said.
Citing a UN road safety report, which recommended drivers to slow down on roads, Sarika Panda said, “Many countries are now adopting this recommendation. But, in India we are doing the opposite. Instead of slowing down, we are developing high-speed roads. That’s the real problem.”
Preventive measures
1. She recommended building speed calming measures, such as table tops, speed cameras, walkways, and cycle segregated tracks, which will help in narrowing down the carriageway.
2. Speed limits on these high speed corridors should be below 50km/hr.
Real cause
Along with this, Sarika also said that we need to find out the real reason for the accident. “After Cyrus Mistry’s death in a road accident, everyone talked about seat belts and airbags, but not many talked about the real cause of it. All these are after measures. We need to find the real problem why it happens in the first place.”
“Humans will make errors. It happens in developed countries as well. We need to build forgiving infrastructure, which means that with someone else’s error, someone else should not die,” she added.
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