The Kerala government should focus heavily on two-wheeler safety and speeding to reduce road accidents and fatalities on the State’s roads, the Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS International), the Jaipur-based public policy research and advocacy group, has suggested.
“In Kerala, road safety is synonymous with two-wheeler safety,” Madhu Sudan Sharma, Senior Programme Officer of the NGO which has been working in the area of road safety, said on Friday. Two-wheelers account for 65% of the total registered vehicles on Kerala roads, and their share in the number of accidents every year is alarmingly high, he said.
Higher risk
In a crash, the fatality risk to a motorcycle rider is eight times that of a person travelling in a car. This risk increases 34-40% and is even higher if the rider is speeding or drunk, he said, adding that India as a whole needs to work harder to meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 3.6) target of halving the number of deaths and injuries from road accidents by 2030.
CUTS International, in association with the Centre for Environment and Development (CED) and the Kerala Road Safety Authority, organised a stakeholder consultation for policy advocacy in road safety in the State capital on Friday.
The NGO has recommended that Kerala put in place a State Speed Management Policy. IIT-Kharagpur, for example, is working with the government of West Bengal on one, Mr. Sharma said.
Perils of speed
“The injury tolerance of humans is 20 kmph. When the acceleration exceeds 30 kmph, the probability of fatal accidents involving pedestrians, bicycles and motorcyclists also increases. Speeding accounts for 60% of the road accidents, 60% of the injuries and 55% of the deaths,” he said.
CUTS International has urged the government to put in place an accountability framework for faulty road design and construction under Section 210D of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, at the earliest. Again, with traffic management revolutionised by AI cameras and sophisticated road safety equipment, it is also high time Kerala revamped the role of its traffic police, it noted.
