30 New Pelican Signals activated across City

 Easing the woes of pedestrians, a total of 30 pelican signals, funded under Safe City Project, were made operational from today. Marking this significant  milestone in enhancing pedestrian safety,   City Police Commissioner Mr.CV Anand inaugurated a pelican signal at  upper Tankbund. This system allows pedestrians to cross the roads  at locations other than intersections and is designed to improve safety for both pedestrians and drivers. An Improved accessibility for people with disabilities or mobility impairments, increased visibility of crosswalks to drivers, regulated & safe flow of traffic  are the key benefits derived from this engineering measure.

Speaking on the occasion, the City police chief said that  the Police & GHMC teams worked in tandem to identify the locations to install these signals.

“ Many road crossing systems like foot over bridges  got into disuse for various reasons as many of them lack awareness, disregard to road rules. Though Pelican crossings are common in abroad, here in our city  we have noticed that many drivers don’t stop at these signals. So we had to train a pool of volunteers to operate these signals & man these point , which is first time in India.” he said.

All these signals will  be manually operated by the volunteers and will give a window of 15-20 seconds  for one to cross the road safely by turning the vehicular signal red in both directions.

Sharing the status of other components of Safe City Project  such as CDEWs, Bharosa centers etc,  he said that most of the facilities will start functioning  in the next 15 days.

Mr.Anand appreciated the traffic wing and appealed the public to cooperate with the volunteers and traffic officers  and asked the GHMC officials to expedite installing the remaining signals in Tri-commissionerates.

He also issued 100 body worn cameras to traffic frontline officers. Cops can record their interactions with the public during enforcement, accidents, and other incidents. “The feed from the body worn camera can be seen live from the Traffic control room. This  will improve transparency and accountability in Traffic Management and keeps a check on undesired behaviours from the violators and the enforcement officers.”  he said .

“This  also helps to exonerate officers when false claims are made against them.” he said referring to the complaints raised by few anguished road rule violators.  

As part of welfare activity, CP Anand distributed kits to traffic constables  & home guards. The kit consists rain coats,  rain boots, Glucose packets, Water bottle and Sunglasses. He also distributed rugged tabs to patrol officers which would help them to attend Dial 100  emergency calls,  screen suspects  and keep a close watch on history sheeters using internal applications and Geo-spatial features and access department’s data in real time. 

 Mr.G.Sudheer Babu IPS , Addl.CP Traffic; Smt.Priyanka IAS, GHMC nodal officer - Safe City; Mr.Gajarao Bhupal, Jt.CP(Coordination & SMIT), staff officers of Traffic,  IT cell of HCP, GHMC officials  were present.