SUMMARY FOR PRESS

SUMMARY FOR PRESS
Vice Chairman of the Planning Commission, Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, released a study Road safety in India: Challenges and opportunities at a function in Delhi on 9th March 2009. The study is a result of collaboration between Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, USA, and is co-authored by Dinesh Mohan, Omer Tsimhoni, Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan. The authors state that in the recent past road traffic fatalities have been increasing at the rate of 8% per year in India over the past 5 years as compared to 5% in the earlier years and reached 106,000 in 2006. They claim that if present policies and trends continue, road traffic deaths are not likely to start reducing before 2030, by which time, the toll may rise to 260,000.
The study has analysed traffic accidents by state, on National Highways and metro cities of India. New road building programmes in urban and rural areas seem to have resulted in an increase in road traffic accidents. The richer states tend to have higher death rates and hilly states low death rates per km of highway. On highways, the majority of victims are pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists. The solution for this would be the provision continuous service lanes along all four and six-lane highways for local and slow traffic.
Analysing urban crashes the authors find that more than 70% of the victims are non-car users. They suggest strict control of drinking and driving, enforcement of compulsory helmet laws in all states, and compulsory use of headlights by motorcyclists in the daytime. They also recommend that all arterial roads in urban areas must have continuous and separate bicycle and pedestrian lanes, banning of left turns on red at junctions, and widespread use of roundabouts.
The study states that unless India specific road designs and policies are developed and implemented death rates are unlikely to reduce. These policies would include compulsory airbags in all cars, pedestrian impact standards for all vehicles, setting up of road safety research centres in academic institutions, and the establishment of a National Road Safety Board.
(Full report at www.iitd.ac.in/~tripp)