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MUMBAI: There has been a 21% drop in road crashes on Mumbai-Pune Expressway and the old highway after 47,000 traffic violators, including 8,124 speedsters, were booked between December 2022 and May 2023, state transport commissioner Vivek Bhimanwar said on Wednesday. The six-month RTO action also led to a drop in fatalities on the two corridors by 10%, he added.
The number of crashes reported on the two Mumbai-Pune highways between January and April 2022 was 94 compared to 74 during the same period this year. “Similarly, the number of fatalities dipped from 61 in 2022 to 55 this year,” deputy transport commissioner (road safety) Bharat Kalaskar said.
Bhimanwar said they plan to carry out similar action on the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Mahamarg and have deployed squads to check on speeding, lane-cutting and other offences. “We are also installing more CCTV cameras, along with the interceptor vehicles, to nab offenders on the spot and issue e-challans,” the transport commissioner said.
More than 6,685 people were booked on the Expressway and old Mumbai-Pune highway for driving without seatbelts during the six-month campaign. The RTO is taking such cases seriously after the tragic car crash in which former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry died last year.
The statistics released by the transport department showed that the speeding cases were highest in January (2,508) and February (1,596), then fell below 1,000 the next two months, and again climbed in May (1,141). In cases of motorists not wearing seatbelts, maximum cases were in January (1,541).
As many as 7,287 motorists, especially those driving trucks, were booked for lane-cutting. Regular travellers on the route complained that trucks often take the extreme right lane and make it difficult for cars and SUVs to overtake.
Eric M Mathias, who wrote to TOI in response to the state procuring more interceptor vehicles to book violators on Mumbai-Pune highways, said: “The highways have trucks and heavy vehicles driving mostly on the fast lane. Whether it is the ghat section or the open highway, somehow this practice has never stopped.” Another TOI reader Avinash Sathe said: “It is a serious problem of heavy motor vehicles driving on all three lanes of the Expressway. This includes ST buses as well. It leads to slow traffic, cars overtaking from left or… trying to go between two heavy vehicles…could be disastrous.”
Kalaskar refuted this, saying that the number of cases of heavy vehicles using the extreme right lanes had dropped drastically following the six-month drive. Besides, the RTO patrol teams have also removed the hawkers and roadside carts near the ghat section as they posed a risk to road safety.
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