Mumbai Traffic Police Designs Safer Roads for the City

18 Nov, 2021

WRI India’s ‘traffic training workshop’ emphasizes on the importance of designing our streets to make it safer and accessible for all.

Mumbai, 18 November 2021: In a workshop conducted on Thursday, Mumbai Traffic police attempted to redesign a city junction to make it safer and accessible to all citizens.

Divided in seven groups, 40 traffic police personnel, who attended the ‘Traffic Police Training’ workshop conducted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), India, attempted to redesign the city’s Lalbaug junction. The training was undertaken at the Traffic Training Institute in Byculla.

Following a two-hour workshop that emphasized on the importance of design to make our streets safer and accessible for road users and improve overall road efficiency in the city, the teams were assigned the exercise of redesigning the Lalbaug junction.

The teams also presented their designs which focused on providing pedestrian infrastructure like refuge islands for pedestrians to halt, clear and visible road markings and continuous footpaths. The designs also focused on lane alignment and reclaiming unused space on roads to improve its efficiency.

Dhawal Ashar, head (integrated transport) at WRI India said, “The workshop looked at providing the traffic police with information on how infrastructure and especially road design plays a very crucial part in improving both, road safety and traffic efficiency. The hands-on exercise also helped them put these ideas and theories in practise.”

The Lalbaug junction, close to the suburban Chinchpokli station, is a three-arm intersection of the BR Ambedkar Road and Sane Guruji Marg. It sees a footfall of nearly 3,500 pedestrians during peak hours. Thousands of devotees also pass through this junction during the 11-day Ganesh Chaturthi festival (Lalbaugcha Raja is a few 100 meters away from this junction). The lack of pedestrian infrastructure has resulted in five fatalities around a 500-meter radius of this junction between 2016-2019.

Under the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety, the junction was redesigned in 2020 by WRI India making it more compact by aligning traffic lanes, shortening the turning radii and reclaiming the unused s