All conversations about road safety in India lead follow this roundabout pattern where the governing authorities complain about the non-conformance to traffic rules, while the resounding outcry in response is the lack of safety infrastructure and enforcement. When Mahindra and SaveLIFE Foundation, an NGO dedicated to making roads in India zero fatality zones, announced their ‘Safety Under 80’ campaign for the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (MPEW), the discourse followed the exact same pattern.
The idea of the campaign was pretty simple. Said Expressway is designed for speeds not exceeding 80km/h. Most accidents that can be filed under the ‘driver’s fault’ category occur owing to speeding (62.2 per cent according to an MoRTH study*). Therefore, maintain the speed limit to minimise risk. Unfortunately and rightly so, the users of said Expressway expressed their resentment thus – Our cars are clearly designed for higher speeds. Why can’t said Expressway be made safe enough to accommodate those speeds? Why can’t concerned authorities make rules similar to the ones applicable to similar carriage ways abroad?
The rated speed of a highway depends on road geometry, pavement design, volume of traffic and the pattern in which this volume increases. While the first two parameters can be controlled by those responsible for the construction and maintenance of the highway (in this case, the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, MSRDC), those last two are tricky ones. It’s safe to assume that at this point, the Mumbai-Pune Expressway handles substantially more traffic than your average European Expressway rated for a top speed of 130km/h. The change in traffic density should thus affect how fast you can go.
Another factor that comes into play is the fact that not all of the 94.5 kilometres of this route are purely Expressway traffic. There’s a nearly 10km stretch that’s shared with the regular highway – the NH4. The traffic from this highway merging into the Expressway traffic is another reason for all road users to exercise caution. It’s also important to mention that this stretch of road cuts right through the undulating terrain of the Ghats. That’s one too many variables to mess with by speeding.
Another problem is that the MPEW was constructed in 2002. And the standards for building such roads in India were only put into place in 2013 through the Indian Road Congress Standards. Thus, the rules for building a highway like this were not exactly laws back then – thus the methods used to construct this highway back then and its current capacity are subject to doubt.
We’re a defiant people by nature. And it’s wonderful that we have full right to exercise our freedom to express resentment. It’s only right to feel short-changed for not getting the same quality of roads when you pay toll that steep. We need to write letters, make the press question it constantly, and lobby towards changing these laws and our roads too. Flouting rules and crossing the speed limit is perhaps the stupidest and least productive way to protest this regulation.
A crashed car displayed at the launch of the Safety Under 80 campaign
The launch event for the SaveLIFE Foundation campaign was perhaps the strangest of its kind. Like the other press conferences we are accustomed to, a car took centre stage at this event – only this time, it wasn’t a bright, sparkling one ready for the showroom. The crushed car bearing maximum damage on the bonnet and front cabin was a silent, morbid reminder of everything that can go wrong when you make that one wrong move in an intense environment like a high-speed freeway. There’s no better way to scare you into driving cautiously.
*This statistic is taken from a report on Road Accidents in India 2015 by the Ministry Of Road Transport & Highways Transport Research Wing. The exact excerpt from the report is as follows:
“Drivers’ fault has been revealed as the single most responsible factor for road accidents, killings and injuries on all roads in the country over a long period of time. Drivers’ fault accounted for 77.1 per cent of total road accidents during 2015 as against 78.8 per cent during 2014. Within the category of drivers’ fault, road accidents caused and persons killed due to exceeding lawful speed/over speeding by drivers accounted for a share of 62.2 per cent (2,40,463 out of 3,86,481 accidents) and 61.0 per cent (64,633 out of 1,06,021 deaths) respectively. However taking into account the total road accidents and total road accident killings, the share of over speeding comes to 47.9 per cent (2,40,463 out of 5,01,423 accidents ) and 44.2 per cent (64,633 out of 1,46,133 deaths) respectively.”