PMC approves mid-block crossings on Lal Bahadur Shastri road

In an attempt to improve the safety of pedestrians and as part of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s road safety campaign initiatives, mid-block pedestrian crossings will be soon seen on Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) road

In an attempt to improve the safety of pedestrians and as part of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)’s road safety campaign initiatives, mid-block pedestrian crossings will be soon seen on Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) road.

HT Image

Former Pune mayor Mukta Tilak had agreed to build mid-block pedestrian crossings on 100 km of divided arterial streets to improve the safety of pedestrians while crossing mid-blocks in the city of Pune.

“Safer and well-designed mid-block crossings are required for a pedestrian to cross the street at mid-block safely and conveniently. It helps in increasing the safety on the street for both pedestrians and other road users by reducing the detour length and pedestrians’ fatalities. It also improves traffic discipline as well as visibility of the street,” said Aditya Chawande, architect, who is working with the PMC on the pilot project.

The Pune pedestrian policy also has the provision of providing mid-block crossings as per IRC 103:2012 which recommends having mid-block crossings for pedestrians at an interval of 80 metres to 150 metres as per the context.

The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has selected 12 divided arterial streets of Pune city having a varied edge for the project. The first phase of selected streets combined length is approximately 45 km of the total 100 km project package.

Parisar with the support of AXA has developed the proposed typical design templates for the pedestrian mid-block crossings for Lal Bahadur Shastri road and presented it to the PMC and the NMT committee in a meeting held in December 2020 which was approved for pilot implementation.

The proposed design has a total of four mid-block crossings of which two of at-grade and two of raised crossings are proposed.

PMC engineers Lalit Bode, and deputy engineer Hemant Jagtap visited LBS road on March 19th for a final check before implementation