A truck takes around 4 hours to cover a distance of 160km if it travels at a speed of 40kmph. What would have been its speed if it covered the same distance in 2.5 hours?
Suri, March 16: Lack of laser guns to track the speed of vehicles has driven Birbhum police back to textbook math, and the calculators are out.
The cops are resorting to the simple unitary method of arithmetic to calculate the distance a vehicle has covered in a particular time. They started the drive last night on two-accident-prone stretches.
On one 8km stretch of NH60 from Naihati bus stand to Kaitha, the police yesterday stopped at least 50 trucks and gave each driver a chit of paper with the time mentioned on it. At the other end of the stretch, another team of cops stopped the same vehicle and recorded the time it had taken to reach there. A simple calculation gave out the speed at which the vehicle was travelling.
Trucks are allowed to travel at a maximum speed of 40kmph.
"According to simple arithmetic, if a truck drives at the stipulated 40kmph, it will cover the 8km distance in 12 minutes. Last night, we found that over 20 trucks had covered the distance in less than 12 minutes, which means they were speeding. Most of them were let off with a warning. But two of them who had covered the stretch in less than 10 minutes were fined Rs 500 each," a police officer said.
District police chief Sudheer Kumar told this paper: "We carried out the exercise through the night. The drive was more a programme to create awareness about speed limits. We started the drive on two stretches and plan to introduce it in other places too."
Kumar said his force had requested Bengal police for speed guns. "But we will continue with the present system."
The East Midnapore administration has been using two laser guns, costing Rs 10 lakh each, for the past one month to catch vehicles speeding on a 90km single-lane road leading to Digha and other beach resorts.
A speed gun sends out a beam of laser light at the vehicle it is aimed at with an optical sight. When the beam of light is reflected back to the laser unit, the unit provides a speed reading.