Coimbatore: Jumping traffic signals isn’t a rare sight in the city. In one such incident, TOI spotted a pillion rider, who grew impatient while waiting at the Peelamedu signal, coercing his friend, who was riding the two-wheeler, to jump the signal as he was getting late. The rider, however, refused to yield to his demand and pointed to the CCTV cameras that were fixed to the signal poles. The pillion rider was in no mood to relent and persuaded his friend not to wait for the signal to turn green as there was no traffic police around to catch them. The pillion rider finally succeeded in forcing his friend to jump the signal, but only to escape a collision with an auto that crossed the junction by the skin of their teeth.
No longer the types of motorists mentioned above could escape without a penalty as the city police have strengthened its mechanisms to identify and penalize the motorists who violate the norms of the Motor Vehicles Act. In the past two months alone, the city police had slapped penalty on 1,13,143 violators. All the violations are logged on the central government’s Parivahan website under the ‘One Nation One Challan’ scheme.
Apart from deploying traffic police at junctions to identify the violators, the police department has been using police E-eye application and CCTV cameras that were installed at 20 major junctions by Uyir, the people’s movement against road accidents, to track down the offenders.
Pointing out that the violators were never forced to pay the penalty amount, a police source said they, however, won’t be able to do any vehicle related work such as changing its ownership, obtaining fitness certificate or renewing their driving licence, until the same was paid.
“As artificial intelligence technology is used in the cameras, it could easily identify the violators among the crowd, read the number plate, click a picture of the violator and digitize the vehicle number. As of now, two-wheeler riders, who are not wearing helmets and jumping the signal, are also identified. Work is on to identify the ones, who don’t wear seat belts and halt at stop line,” the source said.
According to the source, all types of violations are being registered. Explaining that the camera would not click the picture of the same violator in the first half an hour after the first violation, the source said after that second photograph would be clicked and another challan would be issued.
While the violations that are recorded by traffic police through their hand-held machines are automatically uploaded on the website, photographs with time stamp of violations identified through the police E-eye app and CCTV cameras are manually entered on the website by the officials. About 1,500 to 2,000 violations are manually entered on the website on a daily basis.
The source said a message would be sent to the violators if their mobile numbers were registered in the database of the transport department. “If not, they will have to visit the website to know about their challans by entering their vehicle number or driving licence number.”
City-based activist K Kathirmathiyon, who is also a member of road safety committee, said the officials should also consider the circumstances of violations, as sometimes motorists were forced to cross the stop line because of the rash driving of others.
Date: November 15, 2019
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