These 117 Spots Need Urgent Action To Reduce Accidents

New Delhi: Delhi Traffic Police has identified 117 locations where most fatal accidents take place in its Delhi Crash Report 2022, which will be released soon. These locations include Mukarba Chowk in north Delhi, Khampur village in northwest Delhi and Dhaula Kuan and Mayapuri Chowk in southwest Delhi.
The analysis of accident spots in 2022 to identify the cluster points zeroed in on 117 accident-prone zones.Of these, the top 10 spots with the highest number of fatal accidents were termed as ‘black spots’.
A black spot is defined as a road section of 500m length or a junction that has a higher number of accidents than the average annual total crashes computed for the road section and shows a pattern of crash types due to underlying local risk factors.
“If this high crash occurrence has been caused by clear physical road deficiencies, it is essential that such defects should be identified. Thereafter, suitable remedial measures should be devised and undertaken to rectify the defects to reduce both the incidence of road crashes and fatalities on the identified road stretches,” said SS Yadav, special commissioner of police (Traffic).
Traffic officers said that in many cases, the blackspots could be rectified by engineering measures and as such the road owning agency should accord top priority to rectification of such deficiencies. In the preceding three years, traffic police have conducted a spatial analysis of crash data, identifying black spots and assessing the severity of incidents through cluster analysis. The examination aims to pinpoint local risk factors contributing to accidents and, subsequently, propose targeted solutions for rectification based on the identified factors.
The data indicates that Mukarba Chowk stands out with a consistent increase in both simple and fatal crashes over the three years. Additionally, Gandhi Vihar bus stand in north Delhi also returned a high increase in the number of accidents.
Yadav said117 cluster points were identified as crash-prone zones in 2022. “Around 29.9% of the total fatal crashes, or 427 out of 1,428 accidents, occurred on the road stretches at these crash-prone zones, which cumulatively are around 60 km in length,” the officer added.
Among the traffic districts, West with 15 crash-prone zones had the highest such stretches, followed by North-West (14), Outer North (14). and South-East (14). Rohini, New Delhi and Shahdara have the fewest crash-prone zones.
The issue of black spots was taken up at a workshop organised by Delhi Traffic Police. Experts from various agencies were roped in for their advice and suggestions with regard to lessening the dangers at such black spots.
Globally, road traffic injury is considered as a major public health problem. It is among the leading causes of deaths, disabilities and hospitalisation, imposing a huge socio-economic cost on society. As per Global Burden of Disease 2016, road injuries were the eighth leading cause of death in India that year, rising by 22.5% over the situation in 2015, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Road accidents are also among the top 10 causes of death and disability combined as measured by disability adjusted life years (DALYS).