Mumbai: A year after launching the Zero Fatality Corridor (ZFC) on the busy Mumbai-Pune Expressway, SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF), an NGO focusing on road safety, says accidents caused by infrastructural factors have significantly come down.

Heartening as it may sound to record a 30 per cent reduction in accidents and injuries during the last 4-5 months, largely because certain measures were implemented following a safety survey, experts say accidents due to human error and vehicle problems continue to occur.

There is still a lot to be done if road accident deaths on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (MPEW) are to decrease from an annual average of 140 to 0 by the year 2020, which marks the end of the UN Decade of Action For Road Safety, Saji Cherian, Director, Operations, SLF, told Gulf News.

The Zero Fatality Corridor is an initiative of SLF, with corporate social responsibility support of Mahindra & Mahindra, in partnership with the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), which owns the highway.

“Speeding and improper lane changing are two of the major issues that constitute human error, but the Maharashtra Highway Police — with R.K. Padmanabhan, Additional Director General of Police (Traffic), Highway Police, at the helm — has done phenomenal work on enforcing safety on the highway,” he said.

Traffic on the 15-year-old 94.6km expressway has gone up tremendously, and so had horrific accidents.

SLF, which is also dedicated to emergency care across India, commissioned JP Research India Pvt Ltd to conduct a survey of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

The firm carried out scientific crash investigations aimed at better understanding accidents and the resulting injuries, identifying factors that influence them and finding solutions.

Most accidents happen as a result of driver error but the survey showed that this was not always the case. Some crashes were vehicle- or infrastructure-related, it found.

The survey and analysis of 372 accidents between 2012-2014 started with video monitoring of the whole stretch, in both directions by day and night, and identified more than 2,000 infrastructural shortcomings on this route.

The accident-contributing factors included concrete median, poor signage, sharp road curvature, unguarded bridge pillars, entry/exit road, safety barriers, driver vision obstruction, curb stones and even flower pots.

MSRDC has been working on safety measures to counter these factors and the last four to five months have seen an overall dip in accidents compared to the previous period, Cherian said.

Nearly 30 per cent of the accidents examined on the Expressway had driver sleep/fatigue as the contributing factor — a problem observed all over the world — and one way of mitigating it is to install continuous rumble strips designed to alert inattentive or dozing drivers by causing a tactile and audible rumbling when drivers drift from the lane to the edge or centre line.

“We are looking at this solution, too,” said Cherian, though, he added, the challenge is that MPEW is already built and some changes are difficult. “But what we admire about the Public Works Department engineers is that they listen and are always searching for solutions.”

Accidents as result of brake fade, when braking ability is reduced when truck drivers apply brakes continually or repeatedly on a long steep downhill, account for 9 per cent of all accidents and can be resolved by brake checking areas.

Even on emergency care area, the SLF has augmented the 108 ambulance service system with five additional ambulances plying on this route.

With success in reducing infrastructural factors contributing to accidents as well as working on controlling human factors, the SLF hopes to replicate this model for safety on roads in rest of India.