Pune Pedestrian Forum Calls Allowing Free Left A ‘Direct Death Sentence To Pedestrians’

Pune, December 30, 2020: The Pune Pedestrian Forum- Step Towards Empowering Pedestrians (STEP) has remarked ‘free lefts are a direct death sentence to pedestrians’. The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) City Improvement Committee (CIC) has recently passed a resolution stating that motor-vehicles can turn left without waiting for the signal to go green. The forum said that this decision by the authorities is motor-vehicle centric and goes against the safety of pedestrians, which are considered vulnerable road users.

STEP coordinator Priya Pharande said “on urban roads, one cannot ignore the share of pedestrians. Already pedestrian safety is an ignored topic. This decision makes them more vulnerable. It will not allow pedestrians to cross the junctions safely due to the continuous flow of vehicles, thus increasing the risk of a crash. We do not want the general body to approve this decision.”

The recent report of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) 2019 showed that road accident deaths of pedestrians increased by 8 percent at pedestrian crossings in India. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways 2019 report also shows that 25,858 pedestrians were killed in road crashes, accounting for 17 percent of all traffic fatalities.

STEP member Aditya Chawande added, “there are some technical issues like when it is a free-left turn for a vehicle, the speed of the vehicle becomes higher and pedestrians naturally go out of the driver’s angle of vision resulting in low visibility and the possibility of severe crashes increases. Existing junction geometries in Pune are not compatible with free-left vehicle movement as it requires a certain different kind of junction geometries.”