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Recently, It has been observed that Roads and the environment are inseparable spaces.
About Linkage
- In addition to ensuring an easier, more comfortable, and more secure commute, safer roads also have a positive impact on the environment.
- In 2021, India reported 4,03,116 crashes, each of which adversely impacted the environment in various ways and in different degrees.
- Most vehicles contain toxic metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium or hexavalent chromium, which are detrimental to the environment.
- Fuel and fluid leaks are seen at crash sites.
- Severe road crashes lead to automobile wreckage, which becomes a part of unusable end-of-life vehicles. This gives rise to scrappage.
Existing Issues
- India is estimated to have about 22.5 million end-of-life vehicles by 2025.
- With the absence of widespread, systematic facilities dedicated to their proper recycling, vehicles after road crashes as well as old end-of-life automobiles are left to rot by the wayside.
- Some end up at landfills or at informal recycling facilities where rudimentary hand tools are utilized to unscientifically dismantle them.
- This leads to the leakage of hazardous constituents such as oils, coolants, and glass wool.
- Vehicle landfills turn into automobile graveyards leading to wasteful and sub-optimal land usage and water and soil pollution for decades.
- Speeding limits: One of the biggest factors for road crashes is speeding.
- Speeding has consistently been responsible for over 60% of all road crash fatalities in India in the last five years.
- Missing or inadequate signages are another leading cause of road crashes.
- Their absence results in road users being unaware of a stretch’s unique features in a timely manner, which could lead to crashes.
- It is a common standard practice to use asbestos for creating these signages. asbestos has an adverse impact on the environment.
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Global Efforts
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Various initiatives in India
- In India, the Zero-Fatality Corridor solution for road safety by the SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF) takes environmental sustainability seriously and focuses on reducing speeding through advanced engineering and enforcement technologies.
- The Foundation’s Zero-Fatality Corridor (ZFC) programme, which was deployed on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway in 2016, helped bring down road crash fatalities by 52%, as of 2020.
- Similar interventions were introduced in 2018 on the Old Mumbai-Pune Highway and helped reduce the road crash fatalities on this stretch by 61%, as of 2021.
- Initiatives included guarding natural hard structures such as trees using crash barriers to prevent direct collisions, and installing retro-reflective signage on the trees to make them more visible to commuters.
- The Government of India is now building green corridors to go over forests and animal paths as opposed to going through them.
- Scaling this will have a profound impact on preserving the environment while ensuring better road connectivity.
Conclusion and Way Ahead
- Roads and the environment are inseparable spaces. They are not just our shared resources but also our joint responsibility.
- Therefore, safer roads and a sustainable environment can be ensured only through the joint efforts of road-owning agencies, enforcement officials, and the public.
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Mains Practice Question [Q]Road safety and environmental sustainability are closely intertwined concepts. Discuss |
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