Station it right: Ahmedabad Traffic Department to give e-challans for 'no parking zone' violations

If you have parked your vehicle on a 'no parking zone' thinking there was no one watching you, you are mistaken. The Ahmedabad Traffic Department soon plans to issue e-challans for wrongly parked vehicles too. Up till now wrongly parked vehicles were either towed away or locked by the traffic department, and the offender had to pay the fine to get it released. But with e-challans, the owners of wrongly parked vehicle in and around traffic junctions will have the fine challan delivered home.

The decision was taken on Tuesday at a meeting conducted by senior traffic officials in Gandhinagar. "Wrongly parked vehicles create traffic problems and obstruct smooth flow of vehicles. The upgraded e-challan system will capture photographs of such vehicles particularly near traffic junctions where the CCTV cameras are installed," said an official.

This year alone, about 1.46 lakh cases of wrongful parking were detected in the city generating a fine of Rs 1.47 crore for the exchequer. "We are upgrading the system and this will also address many of the problems with the e-challan mechanism," said AK Singh, police commissioner.

The traffic department will also be now upgrading its system to generate e-challans automatically in case of violation of the helmet rule. "At present though the e-challans were sent to offenders for not wearing helmets and the offenders were caught manually. The CCTV monitoring staff would generate footage in which an offender was seen not wearing a helmet. But soon the system will be upgraded and it will generate the particular picture of the offence without any human intervention," said an official.

The department will also be soon cracking down on vehicles with tampered number plates. The matter was discussed at the meeting after recent incidents of traffic offenders changing their number plates to escape fine came to light.