Road rage deaths shoot up in 2012

Hyderabad police to begin enforcing helmet rule vigorously

Hyderabad traffic police successfully organised many special drives on issues like drunken driving, lane discipline, signal jumping and so on.

Despite their vigorous pursuance of different special programmes aiming at the safe and smooth flow of traffic, road accident deaths shot up this year compared to the previous year! Their database says that by the end of December 28 this year, 462 lives were snuffed out in road accidents in Hyderabad.

Sharp rise

This is a sharp rise from 441 deaths witnessed in 2011 even as they went on a spree of scribbling challans, clicking pictures of vehicle drivers violating rules and posting updates on facebook . Interestingly, they succeeded in controlling fatal accidents in 2011 compared to the previous year. While 494 persons died in road accidents in 2010, the figure was brought down to 441 deaths in 2011.

“There are instances of two to three persons getting killed in a single accident. Note that total accidents were less this year but the deaths went up,” says Hyderabad Traffic Police chief C.V. Anand.

Many, including police officials, believed that controlling drunken driving would help reduce road accidents and thereby deaths. Strangely, that didn’t happen in spite of the traffic police launching a massive drive against tipsy drivers using breath analysers and persuading magistrates to award jail terms to violators. Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anurag Sharma, at the customary year-end press conference, remarked that many factors resulted in a spurt in road accidents including the condition of roads. The accident statistics too throw up interesting facts suggesting that the strategy to check fatal accidents should be reoriented.

Pedestrians’ safety

For example, 187 fatal accident victims out of the 406 (up to November end, 2012) are pedestrians. “Crossing roads at many places including Somajiguda circle is like a battle and is turning out to be dangerous. But little is done for pedestrians’ safety,” points out Murali of Begumbazar. Two-wheeler riders occupy the second position with the figures of 129 deaths for the same period. Pedestrians and two-wheeler riders constitute more than 50 per cent of fatal accident victims. Yet, no specific strategy is adopted to bring down the accident rate with them as the targeted group.