The Bangalore City Police have added four more pelican signals to make the city more pedestrian-friendly and reduce the number of pedestrian accidents.
With these, the number of pelican signals has gone up to 35. The pelican lights were introduced in 2008 as part of the B-Trac programme at various junctions. However, the department has still not managed to fix over 20 of these pelican signals that have been non-functional for over six months.
The four new pelican signals are at Command Hospital, outside St Charles School, Kammanahalli, Inner Ring Road near Ejipura and at MICO Layout.
“We have added four more pelican signals recently and this is being done to ease crossing woes that pedestrians face. We had identified certain roads where pedestrian crossing was a big problem and based on that these four junctions were chosen,” said M A Saleem, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic).
Meanwhile, the non-functional signals are causing much problems to the pedestrians and traffic.
“This pelican signal has not been functioning for over 7-8 months now and in the mornings and evenings, there is a huge mess on the road. Since there is no signal for vehicles to stop when students are crossing the road, everyone rides and walks in whatever manner they like,” said Ashwin Aradhya, a student of Christ College.
The situation is the same even at Old Airport Road where a private hospital has patient in-flow through the day. “We have alerted the head office and they will be fixing this as soon as possible,” said the circle inspector at the junction.
With the pelican signals outside malls in the city also not functioning, often traffic jams snake along the road and pedestrians run across the road.
“In some areas BWSSB and BBMP’s activities are ongoing. We want to ensure the work on these roads is complete before fixing these signals,” Saleem argued.