To reduce accidents, BMC to geo-tag spots in Mumbai

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) plans to geo-tag locations of accidents spots in order to identify accidents-prone areas and roads in Mumbai with the help of the $125 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) plans to geo-tag locations of accidents spots in order to identify accidents-prone areas and roads in Mumbai with the help of the $125 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Geo-tagging will not only provide the civic body with the exact spot of an accident, but also what causes it and changes that can be implanted in the road design or enforcement of traffic rules.

Geo-tagging was one of the many suggestions that came up during the two-day brainstorming sessions between 15 experts from New York and officials from the civic body, traffic, health, education department and BEST. “This is the first multi-disciplinary approach towards controlling accidents in the city. Along with geo-tagging the accident spots, we will also collect data from various government hospitals,” said SVR Srinivas, additional municipal commissioner, roads department.

The funds are to be divided into three categories — street design, enforcement and awareness campaigns.

Under the plan, the civic body will work on improving data collection, and change from human-based approach to system-based approach for better enforcement of traffic rules and campaigns.

Apart from mass media campaigns, and teaching schoolchildren about road safety, the BMC plans to buy more infra-red logger machines, which will help in calculating the vehicular density and planning new flyovers or road networks, if required.

At present, the BMC has two such machines.

A few other methods to be applied by the civic body include introducing speed tables in the city. These are similar to speed breakers, but just longer and detachable.