RTO to keep eye on traffic offenders on Mumbai-Pune highway | Mumbai News – Times of India
MUMBAI: State transport commissioner Vivek Bhimanwar on Friday launched a special three-month drive to nab those speeding, lane-cutting, speaking on mobile phones and not wearing seat belts on Mumbai-Pune highways and also Pune-Kolhapur highway. “During our earlier enforcement drive on Mumbai-Pune Expressway and old highway between December 2022 and May 2023,, we had caught over 47,000 traffic violators and fatalities on the corridor had dropped significantly. We plan to run another major drive on this corridor and also on Pune-Kolhapur route where the primary objective is to reduce crashes,” said deputy transport commissioner (road safety) Bharat Kalaskar, who will supervise the two drives till early January. He further said that in the six-month drive till May, road crashes on Pune highways had dropped by 24% and fatalities had dipped by 21%. As many as 8,124 motorists were caught speeding over the limit of 100 kmph. “Our drive will be a continuous process so that there is visibility of uniformed officials in interceptor vehicles and hefty penalties are levied on violators as a deterrent,” he added. Bhimanwar’s team also plans to install more CCTV cameras along with interceptor vehicles to gather digital evidence to catch more traffic violators. Offences under check will be speeding, lane-cutting, not wearing seatbelts, wrong-side parking, using of cellphone while driving, no fitness test (commercial vehicle) and no driving licence. More than 6,685 people were booked on Mumbai-Pune highways for driving without seatbelts during the six-month campaign – that took such cases seriously after a tragic car crash last year in which former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry died. The statistics also showed that speeding cases were highest in January (2,508) and February (1,596) and were below 1,000 for the next two months, but they increased to 1,141 in May. As for seatbelt cases, maximum number of people were apprehended in January (1,541) while there were 673 cases in May.