Ahmedabad: A Centre of Excellence for Road Safety and Traffic Management will soon come up at Viramgam to strengthen road safety and create a safer transportation ecosystem. The groundbreaking ceremony for the project, a joint initiative by Ahmedabad rural police and Honda Motor Company, was held on Friday.The Centre of Excellence will function as a hub dedicated to improving road safety through research, technology, capacity building, data-driven enforcement, public engagement and inter-agency coordination. Honda will invest Rs 3 crore as its corporate social responsibility.A statement said the centre will collect and analyse accident and traffic data to identify black spots, risk trends to recommend evidence-based engineering, enforcement and policy interventions. It will also take up public awareness programmes on road safety. It will pilot, evaluate and scale smart traffic technologies, including AI-based surveillance, intelligent traffic systems and innovative road safety solutions besides leveraging the police department’s Trinetra CCTV network to analyse patterns, detect violations and identify accident hotspots, and explore technologies such as facial recognition.Officials said the centre will strengthen emergency response through coordination with ambulance, hospital and fire services, development of Golden Hour SOPs, and train police officers and volunteers.A number of police officials, including Ahmedabad police commissioner Anupam Singh Gahlaut, Ahmedabad collector Bhavya Verma, Satish Patel, IAS, road safety commissioner, Gujarat Road Safety Authority (GujRoSA) and Vinay Dhingra, head, Honda India Foundation, were present for the groundbreaking ceremony. Rahul Marathe, professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at IIT Madras, will be assisting the project in data analysis and other aspects.
