In News: The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has released the ratings for 18,668 km of completed 4/6 lane NH stretches covering 343 toll plazas, This has been done by NHAI under MoRTH.
Why Rating mechanism for National Highways ?
- Initiative to improve its accountability towards road users, who pay user fees for use of developed National Highways.
- Initiative vision of improving the quality of public services.
- The fundamental objective of the initiative is highway rating is “Minimum time with maximum safety in a stress free environment” from highway users’ perspective.
Rating mechanism for National Highways
- Each toll plaza of highway is judged based on three major criteria viz. Efficiency, Safety and User Services.
- These criteria are further divided into a total of 39 parameters which include average speed, road condition, facility for public like VUP/ PUP/ FOB, service road, delay at toll plaza, accidents, incident response time, wayside amenities, general cleanliness, etc.
- These criteria were framed after detailed studies held in NHAI & MoRTH before its final approval by MoRTH/ GOI.
- No such criteria has been developed across the Globe in the past which evaluates the performance of highways from the users’ perspective.
Importance of Rating mechanism for National Highways
- The Ministry has also begun real-time monitoring of toll plazas across the country.
- It is a simple help to improve traffic congestion problems at toll plazas/ city roads/highways by using a central monitoring system along with a bundle of analytics and quick decision-making outputs.
- This is eventually likely to facilitate saving the Commute Time, Improve Customer Experience, Save Fuel Wastage Cost and Reduce Carbon Footprint.
- It uses several technologies like Satellite Imagery, GIS, Remote Sensing along with a proprietary algorithm to remotely monitor the congestion status of the roads.
Source: PIB
