Gurugram Vision Zero to help reduce accidents in city

To bring down road fatalities and accidents in Gurugram, the district administration will start a ‘Gurugram Vision Zero’ road safety programme starting this Friday, where road safety experts will identify accident-prone sites and come up with solutions to make such stretches safer.

Comprising private as well as government road safety experts, the Gurugram Vision Zero (GVZ), in the first phase, will scrutinise FIRs of road accidents registered in Gurugram in the last three years, identify spots which have reported maximum accidents, the type of collisions, the time and the month at which they occurred, among other such measures.

In the next phase, they will undertake a survey at the spots where maximum accidents have been reported, identify the reasons behind the accident, and accordingly recommend engineering changes and other remedial measures to various agencies, such as the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG), National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), and the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA), in the district road safety meetings.

The district administration, Nagarro--a private software company, and Raahgiri Foundation, an organization supporting sustainable mobility, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the GVZ programme earlier this week. The MoU will be valid for a period of one year, after which the administration and the concerned parties will take a call on further extending the programme.

According to the officials of the district administration, GVZ will operate in a similar manner to the Haryana Vision Zero (HVZ) programme, albeit on a district-level instead of across the state.

“Road safety initiatives, such as GVZ, is vital in identifying reasons behind road fatalities and accidents, based on which remedial measures can be executed on priority,” said deputy commissioner of Gurugram Nishant Yadav.

Taking a cue from Sweden’s Vision Zero programme, HVZ commenced operations in 2017, with the aim of bringing down road fatalities across all the 22 districts of the state to zero.

During the three years of its operation, the total number of road fatalities in Haryana came down from 5,390 in 2017 to 5,125 in 2019. In this period, Gurugram too saw a steady decline in road fatalities, with the city recording 484 road fatalities in 2017, 469 in 2018, and 401 in 2019.

According to data available with the Gurugram traffic police, the city recorded 375 road fatalities in 2020, and 409 fatalities in 2021. Both the years saw many Covid-19 induced lockdowns, as a result of which traffic volume was significantly lower than usual.

The HVZ closed operations in May 2020 after its main funding from an automobile company stopped amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

“There has been no proper study on road accidents in Gurugram for the last two years, ever since HVZ shut down. The GVZ will first tabulate official data available with Gurugram police from January 2020 till December 2021. Once this is done, using HVZ’s 2019 data, GVZ will identify blackspots and accordingly carry out a safety audit at each of the spots. The target is to bring down road fatalities by 20%,” said Sarika Panda Bhatt, co-founder of Raahgiri Foundation.

Any 500m stretch of road, which records more than five road fatalities in a span of three years, is a black spot.

During its three-year tenure, HVZ had identified 21 black spots in Gurugram, all of which were located on national highways such as NH 48, NH 248A, and NH 919.

Both the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway and Delhi-Jaipur Expressway come under NH 48. Sohna Road is also known as NH 248A. The NH 919 is a 74km-long highway connecting Rewari and Palwal, which passes via Sohna and Dharuhera.

“HVZ saved hundreds of lives. Now, with GVZ, we really want to drive home the idea of zero road traffic deaths in the city. This will especially require prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and two-wheeler riders, which is also in line with the mobility plan of the GMDA,” said Manas Fuloria, CEO of Nagarro.