TrafficInfraTech Magazine Linking People Places & Progress
We are in the process of planning for Mumbai Pune Super Expressway. We are carrying out the survey at present. It is already sanctioned by the government and a number of national highways are allotted to us for the purpose of execution.
While visiting the various stalls at TrafficInfraTech Expo, Dilip Salunkhe, Chief Engineer and Head of Toll Monitoring of Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) took out some time to speak with TrafficInfraTech
How did you find TrafficInfraTech Expo? Will it prove helpful to MSRDC?
We execute very big projects like Mumbai-Pune Expressway and Toll monitoring in Mumbai city, and we are going to execute some of the national highways too. At the exhibition, we came to know about various technologies that we can have like traffic monitoring, even the signalling systems and weighing systems. They are very good and useful for the traffic and road safety in our country. They will prove useful to our organization also.
Would you want to take some of the ITS technologies exhibited here for your projects sometime in the future?
I saw new technology for traffic monitoring in one of the stalls. It is very useful for our toll plazas and we will try to implement it. I have invited the vendor to visit us and give a demonstration in detail to enable us to see how it works. Also the technology on traffic counting system, and automatic traffic counter which handles about 29 types of vehicles and 29 categories of vehicles at a time, will be useful for us.
ETC has not taken off in the way it was expected to. When will toll monitoring be much more systemised than it is now?
Nearly 50 percent of our lanes at Sea Link and other toll plazas like Vashi and Dahisar are ETC lanes. A minimum of two lanes are dedicated ETC lanes. We are trying to have 100 percent ETC lanes at the end of this year itself. We are sparing one lane for such hybrid type but it will be 100 percent ETC by the end of this year, i.e., by December 2016.
Any other projects MSRDC is working on?
We are in the process of planning for Mumbai Pune Super Expressway. We are carrying out the survey at present. It is already sanctioned by the government and a number of national highways are allotted to us for the purpose of execution. They are in various stages of being executed and will be completed by the end of 2017 or 18.