By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Sept. 3: The Metropolitan Traffic Police Division (MTPD) has started monitoring speed of vehicles in the Valley roads during the night with night-vision laser speed guns in a bid to reduce cases of accidents.
Speeding is the second major cause of road accidents in the Valley behind driver’s negligence. The MTPD data shows 729 out of 8,935 road accidents in fiscal year 2020/21 were due to overspeeding; 7,425 of the accidents happened because of driver’s negligence.

The MTPD has been monitoring vehicles and penalising around 35 to 40 vehicles on a daily basis for overspeeding, during the daytime, for couple of years now. They had no speed guns to check the speed of vehicles during night until Tuesday.
“The roads in the Valley are mostly congested during the daytime which reduces chances of overspeeding but the case is different during the night. Drivers far exceed the speed limit during the night as the roads are empty,” said Superintendent of Police (SP) Sanjib Sharma Das.

In 2020/21, 2,461 accidents occurred in between 6 pm to midnight and 401 accidents during midnight to 6 am.
SP Das, who is also the spokesperson for MTPD, informed that the division has added four night-vision speed guns. Seven such speed guns have also been distributed to the seven provinces.
Traffic Police officers informed that overspeeding is mostly recorded along the major road sections like Koteshwor-Kalanki, Maitighar-Baneshwor, and Jadibuti-Bhaktapur among others.

“The officers will be monitoring roads by hiding. The signs for speed limits are kept on the roads and the drivers need to follow them. It will help reduce accident to a great extent,” said SP Das.
Two-wheelers are said to be penalised the most for overspeeding. Among 16,031 vehicles involved in road accidents during 2020/21, 7,503 were two-wheelers.
“Alongside the two-wheelers, cars and trucks also exceed the speed limit during the night. We will strictly monitor overspeeding during the night and will increase the quantity of the speed guns soon,” said SP Das.
The division has already fined over 60 drivers for overspeeding with the help of night-vision speed guns.