The 158-km long Outer Ring Road (ORR) continues to take a heavy toll as casualties mount with each passing day. In a latest incident, four daily labourers died at Thondpally village in Shamshabad when their auto trolley overturned after a SUV hit it on Monday. The incident also left 16 others injured.
But what are the causes for these accidents? “The main reason is over speeding coupled with an absolute unwillingness to follow the basic traffic rules,” a senior police official said.
‘Thumb rule’
“Driving at higher speeds require a degree of lane discipline. Motorists should neither overtake from left nor should they drive in a wrong lane. The thumb rule of ‘faster vehicles should ply on the right side’ should be followed by all,” he said.
Not following lane discipline might not be a very dangerous practice on city roads because of slow movement of traffic but a similar attitude while driving on wide roads like the ORR is extremely dangerous.
As the vehicles move at high speeds, the reaction time of the driver and manoeuvrability of the vehicles get considerably reduced, he explained.
Lack of patrolling
But while police officials blame the motorists for not following the traffic rules, they seem to be silent on the aspect of patrolling the stretch or educating them about the perils of driving on ORR. “Authorities are just content with claiming that ORR conforms to the international standards and that it is sound in all engineering aspects. But they are not educating the public about the dangers of over-speeding particularly on ORR. Apart from a few articles in newspapers there are no mass awareness programmes being conducted,” P. Shashi Kanth Reddy, a motorist complained.
“On the pretext of lack of sufficient manpower and equipment, the police is also doing a vanishing act and is not checking the errant drivers resulting in the death of innocent people,” he added.
