Road widening is the only answer to Gujarat’s killer highway

The winding road in no way assists drivers, particularly those travelling at high speed or in heavy goods carriers. Head-on collisions, overturnings, crashes into the road-divider, therefore,are common place.

That it is the geography of the road that is responsible, to a large extent, for the accidents is evident from the fact that the same drivers who use the Ahmedabad-Vadodara stretch turn into model-drivers when they head towards Surat. The Vadodara-Surat connector, incidentally, is four-laned and fitted out with dividers.

According to experts the only way to deal with the traffic — a very large number of heavy-goods vehicles use the highway, which connects Gujarat and Maharashtra, two of the most highly industrialised States — is by widening the road. Despite the urgency, work to convert this stretch into a six-lane carriageway has been in limbo for five years following a dispute with contractors, according to National Highway Authority of India officials.

However, work is likely to resume soon. More than the geography of the road, however, Trivedi and the Traffic Engineering Cell fo the Gujarat Engineering Research Institute blame the drivers for the increasing accidents on thisstretch. The GERI goes to the extent of attributing 84 per cent of the accidents to the drivers.

Superintending Engineer of the Vadodara Circle of NH 8 M M Jivani says most accidents occur because of wrong parking and the tendency to repair vehicles right in the middle of the road. His views are bolstered by statistics provided by the Fajelpur Traffic Aid Post of the NH police. For instance, a speeding truck killed a truck-cleaner, who was changing the wheel of his truck while it was parked in the middle of the road. Another cleaner died when the truck he was riding in rammed into a wrongly parked truck at Novino Checkpost near the Jambua bridge on August 30.

According to R K Chavda, Fajelpur TAP in-charge, accidents could also be attributed to careless driving, overspeeding, wrongful overtaking, lack of signposts, and weak road shoulders.

A three-wheeler driver, he recounts, was killed instantaneously in a head-on collision with a jeep near the Jambua by-pass in August due to sheer overspeeding.Buffaloes travelling in a truck were injured badly after it was hit by a truck coming from the opposite direction with a punctured tyre. Yet another driver in another mishap would have escaped with less serious injuries if the speed of the guilty truck had been 40 or 50 kmph.

Why just trucks, asks Chavda. “Luxury buses normally run at speeds between 90 to 100 kmph, making it difficult for policemen to even read the licence plates.”

So, unless many factors — a widened highway, better driving and adherence to speed limits — come together, there is little likelihood of the Vadodara-Ahmedabad shaking off its uncomplimentary title.