Road Safety

Recent amendement to motor vehicle act means one can land up with fines which are more that the value of the vehicle. I consider this law as a regressive and something which is not well thought out.Better thing to do would be to consult safety experts and work on measures suggested by them. Punishment should always be proportionate to the violation commited.We don't hand out capital punishment for petty crimes.Road accidents are very tragic events and few of my friends have died in road accidents.Last one week I witnessed three accidents on the road.So I very well understand the importance and consequences of road safety.

More than 1.5 lac people die per year due to road accidents in India.That is around 12% of total accident deaths in the world.In many cases people dying are in age group of 20-35 who are sole bread winners of their families.The loss to national GDP due to road accidents is around 2%.So it is very important for India to improve road safety and reduce the number of deaths.The new motor vehicle act may slightly reduce number of accidents but it will not serve the objective of reducing the number of accidents. To solve the problem one needs to tackle the problem at the source.Be preventive than being Regressive. More people die in India due to pot holes than in acts of terrorism. So first task is to divert attention and resources to real problem at hand.To reduce accidents one needs to have scientific approach to solving this problem. Few things which came to my mind are

1.Educating people and children about traffic rules and the damage caused to country due to traffic rule violation.

2.Improve the quality of roads, street lights and make infrastructure of international standards.Make government officials accountable for accidents due to bad road conditions.

3.Remove all the illegal speed breakers and lay them in accordance with regulations.

4.Applying data science and machine learning to find out highest accident prone areas and put up safety measures to reduce accidents at those spots.

5.Prevent stray animals from entering roads. Make underpass for animals to cross roads. Make underpass or foot bridge at every village where there is a highway and people have to cross roads.

6.Mandatory crash worthiness for all vehicles sold in the country

7.Air bags mandatory for all vehicle

8.ABS braking and Power steering mandatory for all four wheelers and load carrier's

9.Punishment for traffic violation should be mandatory contribution towards social activities like tree plantation, teaching, cleaning roads and public place.Heavy fines will only increase corruption and harrasement of common man by the traffic police.

10.Have sensors in vehicles to sense seat belt locking. Vehicle should start only if seat belts are locked.

11.With present level of machine learning it's possible to detect if a driver is drunk.In such an event vehicle engine should stop. Make this mandatory for all vehicles being sold.

12.Have good footpaths,dedicated lanes for cycles and for two wheelers.

13.Improve public transport so that people quit using personal means of transport.A developed country is not where everyone has cars but a developed country is where everyone uses public transport.

14.Mount cameras on all highways.Based on capture of camera hand out automated challans for overspeeding.

15.Have a robust old vehicles scrapage and recycling policy. Being preventive is always better than being regressive.