New Delhi, Oct 23 (IANS) The controversial Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor in Delhi, which has been blamed for adversely affecting the flow of traffic, is a model road project aimed to bring down road accidents, said an expert on road safety Friday.
Dinesh Mohan, coordinator of the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, said: “As compared to other roads, there are fewer accident deaths on the BRT corridor because it offers the pedestrians a marked path to walk on. No other road project in any city can boast of something like that.”

“It’s a model road design that should be adopted elsewhere to bring down the high rate of road accidents in India. Why people don’t like this road design because they can’t speed through it at a neck break speed,” Mohan said at a conference on road safety organised by the International Road Federation (IRF) in the capital Friday.

The 5.6-km long Ambedkar Nagar-Moolchand stretch of the BRT corridor was opened to the public in May last year. The BRT corridor is to be extended to Delhi Gate by next year.

According to officials in the road transport and highways ministry, India has surpassed other countries in the number of road accidents and fatalities. In 2008, India recorded 130,000 deaths because of road accidents, which was 10 percent of the world’s total fatal accidents.

Mohan said one of the most important and often ignored reasons for road accidents is road design.

“In India the average age of a car is four-five years as compared to a much higher age in the US. We actually have a young fleet of cars with the best safety designs. Yet we have surpassed others in road accidents. Therefore the solution to avoid accidents is not just improve car designs - which in any case is reaching a plateau - but improve road designs,” he said.

According to Mohan, from the early part of this century till now there has been an increase in road accidents by at least seven-eight percent every year, coinciding with the national highway building projects in the cities.

“In places like Agra and Faridabad where new roads designs are implemented, the road accident rates have increased almost five times in five years,” he said.

The illegal speed breakers on roads which people make in front of their homes or schools, actually saves a lot of lives, Mohan opined.

“The bottom line is that we need to redesign our intercity roads, have continuous service roads and speed controls near habitations,” Mohan said.