The traffic snarls at the Toll Plaza is daily affair for most of my colleagues. Their minds go numb at the gross national wastage of productive working hours and precious fuel of the idling engines. The talks on Green Energy and awareness around greenhouse gases seem to be meaningless. Many of the folks waiting in long queues are engineers and can algorithmically prove that wastage caused by Toll Plaza is more than the productive collection by DGSCL. One enthusiastic company MTS proclaimed that they will bear the burden of Toll during the peak traffic hours. Good suggestion but the reporter says that officials at DGSCL are not pleased with it. I am sure MTS meant Free Talk Time at Toll Plaza during peak busy hours and the reporter at the TOI would have gotten carried away.
Searching on net found some links which report that the Toll Plaza was designed for 75K vehicles/day and is currently experiencing 200K vehicles/day. Not sure why DGSCL increased the Toll by almost 50% in last 18 months? Isn’t higher number of vehicles giving DGSCL better return on investment on their original business case? There better be a good justification for this highway robbery, anyone for RTI followed by PIL? You know how an idle mind works when stuck in long queues.
Not sure what the official reports says but it is my guess that more than 70% vehicles do not use the ETC (Electronic Toll Collections) Tags. Given the situation what can be done? I have asked several taxi drivers while waiting in the queue on my way to Airport, on what they think can be done to make things better. Most of them have given exemplary suggestions –
- The toll must be in round figure. Rs 10, Rs 20, Rs 30 so on and so forth.
- The vehicles which get into Tag Lanes and insist to pay cash must pay Rs 10 more.
- The display on each Toll Gate statistics like Average Queue Waiting Time, Time to serve One Vehicle, Number of Vehicles in the Queue. Of course DGSCL can consider broadcasting this to Radio Stations and use it for internal training and rewarding their staff.
- There should be a ramp of 10-15 degree for around 500 meters. This will allow vehicles to switch off engines and use the slope to roll the vehicle. This will help in reducing fuel wastage.
- Collect return Toll from daily commuters.
- Register vehicle Mobile for mBanking payment of ETC charge. A simple Bluetooth device or SMS based service can help facilitate authentication of online payment.
What are your suggestions? Please do share.
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