City not ready for Bangalore traffic model yet: Cops to HC

The affidavit,filed by Assistant Commissioner of Police (planning division),Pandit Kale,states: “This system cannot be currently adopted in Mumbai without data of registration of vehicles in digitised form available online. The office of the Joint Commissioner of Police,Traffic Control Branch,Mumbai,has requested the Transport Commissioner of Maharashtra to provide the data even for day-to-day references.”

The affidavit was in response to a submission by the Western India Automobile Association,which had told the court that CCTV cameras in Bangalore are designed in such a way that they capture the licence plate number of the offender and the image is relayed to a central monitoring unit. The stored image is linked through a software to the RTO to obtain the address and contact details of the registered vehicle and automatically an intimation is sent to the vehicle-owner about the date,time,place and the nature of traffic offence for payment of the appropriate fine.

But in an apparent lack of coordination within the Traffic Police department,Kale’s affidavit came a day after Minister of State for Home Satej Patil and Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Vivek Phansalkar visited Bangalore to study how they can get more funds for the Traffic Police and avoid red tapism during procurements by emulating the Bangalore Traffic Improvement Project or B-TRAC. A team from the Traffic Police is also expected to visit Delhi soon to study its traffic models.

Sources revealed that frustrated by long delays in getting road furniture such as zebra crossings,medians,islands,traffic barriers,bollards,traffic signs,and tired of dependence on other agencies such as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC),the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC),City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco),and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for essential requirements on the city’s roads,the Mumbai Traffic Police hopes to get an independent corpus of funds at its disposal like their Bangalore counterparts under the B-TRAC scheme.

“We were in Bangalore for a day on Wednesday to study the B-TRAC model,which has been highly successful there. While there are obvious geographical differences between the cities,there are certain common factors such as the increasing number of vehicles and limitations of space,and the widening gap between the number of policemen and cars. It is always good to go and study the ground realities there and exchange information on successes and flaws in traffic management in both cities,” Phansalkar told Newsline.

Asked about the contradiction between their trip and the affidavit in the court,Phansalkar said,“It’s not that we have said we don’t want to implement the Bangalore model or that it is not feasible. It’s just that we need some time to do so as some necessary infrastructure has to be put in place first. For instance,if we have e-challans,they will have to be served to people. To do this,we need an address database,which is at present only with the RTO and needs to be merged with the Traffic Police. We have to locate an address and send our men there and so logistical problems,such as manpower shortage,have to be sorted out.”