Calcutta Police will borrow a British traffic management concept to plan Scoot, a system to speed up vehicular movement on city roads. The proposal is awaiting the transport department?s green light.

?If everything is in order, Calcutta will be the second city after Delhi to introduce such a hi-tech traffic signalling system. Initially, we will introduce the system in the Central Business District and later extend it to other areas,? said Banibrata Basu, joint commissioner of police (traffic).

Criticised for a poor and faulty signalling system on many city roads, transport minister Subhas Chakraborty recently held a meeting with senior officials, where the traffic police proposal was discussed.

Under instructions from the minister, chief traffic and transportation engineer B.K. Sadhu visited Delhi last week to acquaint himself with its modern signalling system.

If the scheme is launched, it will be the first time that vehicular movement on a road will be regulated in accordance with the density of traffic flow. For this, sensors will be embedded in arteries which will keep a count of traffic.

Now, signals are controlled by timers that change the red, yellow and green lights at predetermined intervals. ?So, red lights do not turn green even when a stretch of road is free of traffic. Owing to this system, traffic gets clogged on a busy stretch,? explained Basu.

The new system will flash the green or the red light in accordance with the flow of traffic. Basu said the sensors embedded in thoroughfares will count cars or heavy vehicles and relay the information to the central computerised system at the Lalbazar police headquarters, which will control traffic signals at different intersections.

?It will be a completely automatic system. The central computer at Lalbazar, after getting the traffic-flow count through sensors, will decide whether the green light should be on for more time or not,? said joint commissioner Basu.