Dangerous ways

The escalating crime rate on the motorway has failed to wake up the concerned authorities from their deep slumber as they have been unable to provide missing surveillance facilities to make the road safe for travelers.

Majority of the travelers prefer to choose motorway compared to the GT road as they feel driving on motorway is much safer because of its monitoring system and friendly police force. However, of late the missing facilities on the motorway are compounding the woes of the travelers.

The National Highway Authority (NHA) is responsible for providing facilities on motorways including its surveillance system. The Motorway Police have repeatedly highlighted the missing facilities on the Lahore-Abdul Hakeem Motorway (M-3) segment but the concerned authorities are putting a deaf ear to the reminders.

It is pertinent to mention that M-3 was inaugurated on April 1, 2019.

It seems that the National Highway Authority (NHA) is quite helpless in front of the vendors responsible for supplying the equipment to enhance the required facilities. These vendors have failed in timely installation of fixed and moveable speed-checking cameras as per the specifications of Motorway Police though the NHA officials are not taking any action against the violators of the contract which has caused a huge losses to the national exchequer.

Since the inauguration of Lahore-Abdul Hakeem Motorway (M-3) segment in April 2019, the National Highways and Motorway Police (NH&MP) has repeatedly complained about non-operation of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).

The NH&MP Inspector General, in a letter to Chairman NHA, has revealed the missing surveillance facilities on Lahore-Abdul Hakeem Motorway. The letter revealed that only 13 out of 63 Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) cameras and just 18 out of 124 fixed cameras are working. Besides, only recording of 23 out of 31 cameras are taking place at the Traffic Control Centre (TCC).

The cameras supplied by Zahir Khan and Brothers (ZKB) are faltering in performance. The constant fluctuation is severely hampering the monitoring process of surveillance. Moreover, the blind spots between the two installed cameras of about one km in the daytime and more than three km at night have caused quite a few accidents there.

The letter further revealed that as per the contract agreement, no video surveillance analytic application had been developed to generate any alert for effective monitoring of the carriageway. The total uptime of the surveillance cameras during the month of August 2020 was 23 per cent for ZKB and 12 per cent for CR20G. It said that as per the agreement, both portable and fixed speed-checking cameras were to deliver to NH&MP before the day of the inauguration of M-3, but not a single portable camera had been given to NH&MP and following issues were being faced by NH&MP while checking over-speeding with fixed Auto Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras.

To begin with, all speed gantries were down on 25th September from 1300 hrs. Secondly, calibration of all speed gantries had not been done since their installation so they were generating inaccurate speed and road users were registering their complaints on Prime Minister Citizen Portal about it.

Hence, it was creating a poor image of NH&MP in the eyes of the public though the authority was not directly responsible for the mishap. Moreover, the vehicle capturing ratio was about 70 per cent instead of 95 per cent, as mentioned in the contract agreement. No section speed was generated as all toll plazas were not configured with SES. Besides, the system was not fully capable to classify between HTV and LTV as NHSO 2000 have different speed limits for both types of vehicles. A number of plate reading errors were also observed i.e. missing digits and alphabets and wrong capturing. The gantries were not installed as per contract obligations. They were supposed to be installed at every 10 km but they were installed on interchanges at distances of approximately 40 km to 50 km.

In another glaring incident of negligence, only one out of the 15 applicable software was provided to NH&MP for road monitoring and traffic violations, the letter from IG Motorway Police said.

It is pertinent to mention here that all aforementioned issues had already been communicated to concerned authorities of NHA even before the inauguration of M-3 but no improvement has been noticed so far. Furthermore, maintenance services as well as the deployment of technical staff at TCC has also not taken place. Most importantly, the main part of the project, the Auto Alert System, is still missing.

Meanwhile, obsolete technology known as the ‘inducted loop’ is being used for speed measurement instead of Radar technology which is not effective and it is generating inaccurate speed of cars. It was also observed that no mechanism of wireless communication with Beat from TTC was available, which is indispensable for the fruitful utilization of this modern system.

When NHA was approached for its version the department replied that the contractor responsible to install Intelligent Transport System (ITS) along Motorway M-3 (Lahore-Abdul Hakeem) is still in the process of completing his work. “As and when the job will be completed by the contractor, the system will be handed over to the National Highway Authority. After that NHA will be responsible for its proper operationalisation,” it stated.

The NHA reply shows that they least bother about the speed monitoring system despite the fact that they are responsible for controlling fatal accidents that occur due to over speeding of drivers.

Despite several attempts NH&MP failed to give its response over the issue till the filing of this story.