(Hundreds of pedestrians risk their lives daily while crossing busy roads such as the one near Huda City CentreMetro Station in Gurgaon. (Manoj Kumar/HT)

Frequent jams, traffic bottlenecks, lack of road space, non-functional traffic signals and unmanned crossings are major trouble areas.

Flaws in road design force commuters to take a detour of seven kilometres from Rajiv Chowk to the Kherki Dhaula toll plaza in order to take a u-turn. Gurgaon residents risk their lives while maneuvering through high-speed vehicles as they negotiate a u-turn to go to Ambience Mall.

Getting stuck for 30 minutes at the Signature Tower Chowk during peak hours is a routine affair and the absence of a traffic signal at the Huda City Centre Metro station, which is often unmanned, only makes things worse.According to the mobility plan on Gurgaon prepared by the Department of Town and Country Planning, the average speed of intra-city traffic in the city is 23 kilometres per hour. Motor vehicles use 60% of the total roads in Gurgaon whereas public transport occupies only 10% of road space. Only 23% roads have walkable footpaths.

Nearly 2,300 kms of internal road network notwithstanding, the Millennium City lacks adequate space, thanks to the surging number of vehicles on roads.

Nearly 60,000 new vehicles are registered every year in the city and 10 lakh vehicles ply on city roads everyday that include around five lakh inter-city vehicles plying mainly on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway and Gurgaon-Faridabad Expressway.

At major Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway crossings like Shankar Chowk, Iffco Chowk, Signature Tower and Rajiv Chowk, ill-designed u-turns, faulty traffic lights or their absence, oversized concrete triangular structures that bifurcate traffic through slip roads make driving on Gurgaon roads a horrible experience.

“While cities like Ahmedabad have taken a lead in addressing traffic woes as their top priority, there seems to be a complete policy paralysis in Gurgaon when it comes to planning and implementing models of traffic management,” says Sarika Panda, a city resident and an urban planning expert, who is working with the Haryana Urban Development Authority to promote non-motorised transport (NMT) in Gurgaon. Heavy reliance on private cars as there is hardly any public transport system in the city adds to the chaos, she adds further.

City resident and former joint commissioner of police (traffic), Delhi, Maxwell Pereira points out that pedestrians and cyclists are left out when planners make crossings and roads in India.

Gurgaon joint commissioner of police Maheshwar Dayal, who is presently also looking after the traffic department, says all stakeholders are trying to work in tandem.

“We hold routine meetings with civic bodies and make them aware of design faults at crossings. We have raised the issue of the bottleneck at Sirhaul toll plaza bottleneck on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway at highest levels including in courts,” he says.

A senior official of the Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda), which has planned 30 cycle  shelters across Gurgaon, said that the service at the Huda Metro station will start first in a fortnight.

Initially, the service will be launched at the five Metro stations — Huda City Centre, Iffco Chowk, MG Road, Sikanderpur and Guru Dronacharya.

“A commuter can hire cycles at these shelters against fixed charges and on submission of an identity proof. While the first two hours will cost R10, the subsequent hours will cost R5 extra for each hour. The user will have to submit the original copy of an ID proof, preferably government documents. The service will be available from 9am to 8pm, but one can keep the cycle overnight at an extra charge of R100,” said Sudhir Haryal, promoter of Planet Advertising, the firm that will run the cycle shelters.

While such services are very popular near Metro stations in Delhi and have huge takers among students of Delhi University’s north campus, Gurgaon residents have long been demanding such non-motorised transport infrastructure in the city.

Source-http://www.hindustantimes.com/

The joint commissioner of police directed ACP Bhupinder Singh to initiate the work on the project. After the cameras are installed, police will be able to check suspicious activities.

Joint commissioner of police Maheshwar Dayal told HT: “The initiative will ensure safety and security of commuters. The cameras would record all incidents of robbery, theft, molestation and traffic violation. The control room of the CCTV cameras would be in my office.”

According to police, two traffic officials have been given the task of monitoring the CCTV feeds.

The ACP said, “We do not have exclusive cameras to keep a tab on the movement of suspicious elements. This initiative will help us identify, chase and nab the accused.”

Although gangs like ‘maxi-cab’ gang that killed about 30 people are active in Gurgaon, police have not taken any effective steps to curb such incidents. A Mewati gang also operate in the city at night.After the cameras are installed at Iffco Chowk, Gurgaon police will focus on the other three intersections. These intersections have become a potential security hazard to the commuters.

Source-http://www.hindustantimes.com

The PWD official said they had asked the Delhi Metro to make such a provision at its upcoming stations along Ring Road and Outer Ring Road. Delhi Metro will construct about 230km Metro network in the next few years. Two of its longest lines being constructed under phase 3 — Mukundpur to Yamuna Vihar and Janakpuri to Botanical garden (Noida) — are coming up along Ring Road and Outer Ring Road, respectively.  Delhi Metro officials said they were making conscious efforts to provide smooth passage to pedestrians through its stations wherever possible. “The stations built in phase 1 do not have this facility but all stations, whether elevated or underground, built in phase 2 provide passage to pedestrians,” a DMRC spokesperson said.

While stations between Rajiv Chowk and Dwarka do not allow pedestrians to use the Metro stations to cross busy Patel Road or Najafgarh Road, all stations in Noida and Gurgaon can be used to cross the roads. “In phase 3 and phase 4 also, we will make provisions for pedestrians to cross through the unpaid area,” the spokesperson said.

Source-http://www.hindustantimes.com

By Clifford Nass, Special to CNN

• Clifford Nass: More of our brain is devoted to speech than anything else; we love to talk
• Nass: Talking to technology in your car is not natural and it confuses your brain
• He says even with hands on wheel and eyes on road, talking to your car impairs driving
• Nass: Your brain works to fill in the blanks talking to an entity you can’t see and doesn’t listen

Editor’s note: Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University and director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab. He is the author of “The Man Who Lied to his Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships,” “Wired for Speech” and “The Media Equation.”(CNN) — Speaking is profoundly human: More of the human brain is devoted to speech than any other activity. People can have an IQ of 50, or a brain that is only one-third the normal size and have difficulties with many simple tasks, but they can speak.Humans are so tuned to words that from about the age of 18 months, children learn about eight to 10 new words a day, a rate that continues until adolescence.Humans love to speak: When two hearing people encounter each other, they will speak, despite having other means of communication such as gesturing or drawing. Even when people speak different languages or come from different cultures, they will try to find common words and phrases.One-day-old infants can distinguish speech from any other sounds and 4-day-olds can distinguish between their native language and other languages. Even in the womb, a fetus can distinguish her or his mother’s voice from all other female voices. Adults can distinguish speech sounds at twice the rate of any other sounds, aided by special hair cells in the outer right ear.

Clifford Nass

 

Curbing distracted driving

NTSB: No cell phones while driving

Among all animals, only humans have the necessary breathing apparatus and musculature to be able to speak: despite the “Planet of the Apes,” no primate could speak like a person, even if their brains grew. Even human ancestors such as the Neanderthal could not possibly speak: speech is a new and remarkably impressive ability.

So, there is nothing so human as speech — at least until modern technologies came along. Through striking advances in a computer’s ability to understand and produce speech, it is common to use your telephone to make airline reservations, answer questions and search the Web.

Because of the shrinking size and increasing speed of computers, it is also possible to speak directly to your automobile.

From putting up with the car intoning, “Your door is ajar,” we have moved to navigation systems that can tell you where to find a latte and car interfaces that understand spoken commands and even allow drivers to dictate e-mails, texts and make phone calls.

What could be more simple and natural than talking, even to a technology? And speaking to cars seems particularly desirable. We don’t have to take our eyes from the road or our hands from the wheel to select buttons or make choices: Why not let our mouths and our ears do all the work?

Unfortunately, it’s not so simple or so desirable.

Recent research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, conducted by David Strayer at the University of Utah, finds that the new technology can be so distracting it impairs the ability to drive. Studies found that while driving, our attention becomes overloaded by speaking. It basically takes our minds, if not our eyes, off the road.

Here are three reasons why talking while driving is so distracting, and not as safe and effective as you might think:

People like to picture who they are talking with. When you speak with someone face-to-face, you “hear lips and see voices”: Your brain automatically and easily focuses on the person.

When you speak on the telephone, you use brainpower to create a mental image of the person you are talking with: The less you know the person, the more mental workload it takes. When you talk to a car, use a phone in a car or dictate a text message, your brain has to do a great deal of work to picture with whom you are communicating. When you’re thinking that hard, it’s very difficult to pay attention to the road.

That’s why talking on a cell phone — hands free or not — is much more dangerous than talking to a passenger. The need to imagine steals from attention to the road.

People want to be understood. Although people love to speak, there are few more frustrating things than someone not listening. Listeners puts a great deal of energy into showing that they are listening: They nod their head, say “uh huh,” open their eyes and change their posture. People are built to expect these signals of attention, but cars refuse to provide them.

As a result, drivers become overly concerned with whether the car understands or is even listening, and their attention is again drawn away from the road. In addition, the voice of the car does not have the rich vocal cues that indicate engagement and emotion, providing further evidence that the car isn’t understanding.

Cars are not native speakers. When you encounter someone who isn’t facile in your language, you have to put a great deal of time into selecting the right words, avoiding idioms and speaking slowly and clearly. Speech is no longer an easy and natural means of communication in these instances.

While it is remarkable that cars can understand something that took billions of years of human evolution, the typical car recognition rate of 85% to 95% makes it a mediocre second-language speaker. As a result, speech becomes effortful and demanding, stealing attention from the road.

Because of these problems, my laboratory and laboratories around the world are trying to find ways to support the driver in creating mental images, in showing that the car wants to understand and enabling the car to understand at levels equal to or even better than a person.

And soon cars will be driving themselves, so that people can ignore the road and multitask their way to fighting for attention from each other, just as they do outside the car.

Source-http://edition.cnn.com