The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Pedestrian safety still an issue

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Friday, Jan 02, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Pedestrian safety still an issue

Vidya Venkat

“They should be given first preference in traffic management programme”

— PHOTO: K.Pichumani

STUMBLING BLOCK: Pedestrians can be often seen clambering over medians when there is no gap in them for long distances.

CHENNAI: When the city is observing ‘Road Safety Week’ beginning on Thursday, traffic experts have raised several issues pertaining to road safety, particularly pedestrian safety.

K. Gunasekaran, assistant professor, transportation engineering at Anna University, said that pelican signals, push button system, were the best bet for making the crossing of signals a safe experience for the pedestrians.

“The pedestrian will have the privilege of turning the pedestrian crossing signal on when he wants to cross,” he said at a recent seminar.

At Kasturba Gandhi signal, the pedestrian signal operates even at night when there is hardly anyone there to cross the road. With the pelican signal push-button system, this problem would never arise, he said. “Traffic engineer should be appointed. We don’t do that. One-way arrangement needs technical inputs.”

According to experts, pedestrians need to be given first preference in any traffic management programme. However, road safety activists feel the city has a long way to go before this is achieved.

Karen Coelho, who heads the citizen’s collective Walking Classes Unite, said that medians put up in the city were pedestrian-unfriendly as there were no gaps for long distances, forcing people to clamber over them. She said that roads where medians were put up should also have facilities in place for pedestrians.

S. Karthik, a resident of Anna Nagar, said that the medians put up recently at Fourth Avenue in Shanti Colony were making life difficult for residents as the road already had several parked vehicles and thus reduced the road space. He pointed out that Harrington Road, which had a number of schools, was also a dangerous place for pedestrians, especially around the time when the students were leaving school. “The medians put up on this road have only heightened the pedestrian problem,” he said.

P.Amudha, who walks to the Velachery railway station from her house every day, said that it was an arduous task trying to cross the junction at Vijaynagar bus stand as vehicles came from all four directions and often there was no traffic police there. Senior citizen and Adyar resident R.Veeramani said that he often ended up joining a group of pedestrians and crossing the roads wherever vehicles moved very fast and often did not care to stop to let pedestrians cross.

Mr. Gunasekaran suggested that the practice of asking neighbouring building owners to maintain the pavements, as done in some other countries, could be tried here as well.

“This will make life easy for the pedestrians,” he said. When heights of footpaths are raised in keeping with raised road height after relaying, they became too tall for people to climb.

He also suggested that the city needed more pedestrian subways as these received better patronage when compared to foot-over bridges.

Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sunil Kumar told The Hindu that in view of pedestrian safety, the police was going to be very strict about stop-line violations by vehicle users. He also urged pedestrians not to jay-walk and use the subways and foot-over bridges wherever the facilities were available. He also urged pedestrians to not cross the roads at the starting and ending points of flyovers as was often seen near flyovers in different parts of the city.

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