Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Four months, 57 accidents and 34 deaths! This is what took Bhopal Smart city officials to wake up and understand the gravity of the situation on BRTS. The Smart City has now decided to install gates on 23 out of 34 cut points along the 22-kilometre long Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) corridor of Bhopal.
Officials at the Smart city office maintained that earlier, the gates at all these corridor cuts were intact, but were later damaged after vehicles rushing at a high speed rammed into them. Smart city’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Sanjay Soni said that the work to install the gates at BRTS cut points will begin within a week. It is noteworthy that driving vehicles in the BRTS lane is the major contributor to road accidents in the state capital. In the last four months, the corridor has witnessed 34 fatalities in 57 accidents.
Currently no volunteers are found there to monitor the entry of unauthorised vehicles on the dedicated bus lane. The smart city officials also announced plans to recruit as many as 100 more volunteers to ensure no unauthorised vehicles cruise through them. As of now, the penal action on BRTS offenders is being carried out at two city localities - Kamla Nagar and Sant Hirdaram Nagar.
In the past two weeks, almost 800 BRTS offenders have been penalised at these two localities, the smart city officials said. In many of the BRTS violations, the accused in the hit-and-run cases have also gone on the lam due to dysfunctional CCTV cameras there.
Additionally, apart from installation of gates on cut-points of the BRTS corridors, the Smart City is also mulling over collaborating with the city traffic police to pull the plug on accidents and rash driving on the BRTS corridor. Recently, the officials chaired a meeting in which the complete review of the state of BRTS corridor was conducted, and all the parameters requiring redressal were addressed.
The Deadliest: As per says Bhopal traffic police data, BRTS corridors at Misrod and Polytechnic square are the deadliest ones, which have claimed numerous lives due to over-speeding.
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