Police have launched a helpline number — 1073 — for motorists whose cars and two-wheelers get stranded on the Parama or AJC Bose Road flyover because of a breakdown.
Officers said the helpline had been launched to reduce the time taken for a wrecker van to reach the spot and normalise traffic on the flyovers by removing the defunct vehicle.
Signage displaying the helpline number has been placed on the two flyovers.
“The idea is to involve the motorists in the process. We want to know the exact location of the breakdown from the person driving the vehicle, instead of being told by passers-by or guessing the location from images of traffic snarls on the flyovers captured by CCTV cameras,” said an officer of Kolkata police’s traffic department.
A senior police officer said it had often been noticed that motorists felt “helpless” if they were stranded in the middle of a flyover and were clueless whether any help was coming at all.
“By directly speaking to the police through the helpline, the motorists will not only share their exact location, which would help us locate them quickly, but will feel more confident that efforts were on to rescue them,” the officer said.
Till now, the police monitor the traffic flow on the Parama flyover through the 16 CCTV cameras installed at various spots on the structure or through officers on patrol duty.
“The quality of images captured by the cameras is not always good, especially during heavy rainfall. And if the breakdown spot is outside the CCTV coverage, it becomes more difficult to locate the vehicle and more time is lost in reaching the spot.
Things would be easier if the person driving the vehicle directly shares the location with us,” the officer said.
A wrecker van each is stationed at the Park Circus and Chingrighata crossings, at the Victoria Memorial-end of the AJC Bose Road flyover and at the point where the city-bound flank of the AJC Bose Road flyover starts near Science City.
The police said the wrecker vans are mobilised depending on the breakdown spot.
Multiple cases of vehicle breakdown are reported from the flyovers every day.
Such incidents reduce the traffic speed and at times cause huge snarls.
Breakdowns are more common during the monsoon, when the roads are usually wet. The police said the ripple effect created by a single breakdown takes hours to subside.