Hyderabad: CP CV Anand launches Pelican signals

Hyderabad: Easing the woes of pedestrians, a total of 30 ‘Pelican Signals’ were made operational from Wednesday. Marking the significant milestone in enhancing pedestrian safety, Hyderabad City Police Commissioner C V Anand inaugurated a pelican signal at upper Tankbund.

The Pelican signal system allows pedestrians to cross the roads at locations other than intersections and is designed to improve safety for both pedestrians and drivers. An improved accessibility for people with disabilities or mobility impairments, increased visibility of crosswalks to drivers, regulated and safe flow of traffic are the key benefits derived from this engineering measure.

On the occasion, the Commissioner said that the Police and GHMC teams worked in tandem to identify the locations to install these signals.

“Many road crossing systems like foot over bridges got into disuse for various reasons as many of them lack awareness, disregard to road rules. Though Pelican crossings are common in abroad, here in our city we have noticed that many drivers don’t stop at these signals. So, we had to train a pool of volunteers to operate these signals and man these points, which is the first time in the country,” he said.

All these signals will be manually operated by the volunteers and will give a window of 15-20 seconds for pedestrians to cross the road safely by turning the vehicular signal red in both directions.

Sharing the status of other components of the Safe City Project such as CDEWs, Bharosa centers etc he said that most of the facilities will start functioning in the next 15 days.

Commissioner appreciated the traffic wing and appealed the public to cooperate with the volunteers and traffic officers and asked the GHMC officials to expedite installing the remaining signals in Tri-Commissionerate.

Later, CV Anand also issued 100 body-worn cameras to traffic frontline officers. Officers can record their interactions with the public during enforcement, accidents, and other incidents. “The feed from the body worn camera can be seen live from the Traffic control room. This will improve transparency and accountability in Traffic Management and keep a check on undesired behaviours from the violators and the enforcement officers,” he said.

As part of welfare activity, CP Anand distributed kits to traffic constables and home guards. The kit consists of rain coats, rain boots, glucose packets, water bottle and sunglasses. He also distributed rugged tabs to patrol officers which would help them to attend Dial 100 emergency calls, screen suspects and keep a close watch on history sheeters using internal applications and Geo-spatial features and access department’s data in real time.

G Sudheer Babu, Additional CP Traffic, Priyanka GHMC nodal officer - Safe City; Gajarao Bhupal, Joint CP (Coordination & SMIT), officers of Traffic, IT cell of HCP, GHMC officials were present.