Heavy vehicles should be kept on the left side on the highway or expressway and the middle or right lane should be used only for overtaking. Light or small vehicles such as cars and SUVs should ideally have a right of way for the middle and outer lanes.
Cyrus Mistry car accident: Visual report from site
However, this discipline is nowhere to be seen.
Highly placed sources said police are also probing the possibility of a truck being involved in the accident in which two people, including the former Tata Sons chief, were involved. Cyrus Mistry were killed.
It is possible, he said, that a heavy vehicle may have turned to the right on the Charoti toll naka section, causing a Mercedes SUV driven by Anahita Pandole to overtake the left side at high speed.
Sources in the state government’s infrastructure wing said that the pandol might have got stuck inadvertently at this point of time due to the sudden narrowing of the lanes over the bridge.
She could have miscalculated the width of the road and hit the concrete railing on the left.
Officials said that the police is investigating the situation in detail.
In a similar accident a few weeks ago, a Maratha leader Vinayak Mete died on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway when the driver of his SUV rammed into a multi-axle container truck while attempting to overtake. The truck was going out of the middle street.
Nitin Dossa, President, Western India Automobile Association, said that fines should be imposed to deal strictly with lane indiscipline so that no truck driver dares to speed on the right side on highways.
“The police should take them into custody instead of just imposing fines. They should be forced to undergo training before they are released from the police stations,” he said.
“On the expressway, trucks for the most part are on the left and middle lanes, not the first lane which is for cars. Whereas if you go on the Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore highway via the Pune bypass, you will find trucks on the outer lane. .
“As long as you keep moving till you take right at Mahabaleshwar, trucks are usually found in this lane. As a car driver when you have trucks at low speed then one is forced to overtake from the wrong side If there is an accident, police or newspapers will say that the car was overtaking from the wrong side. Insurance companies will say wrong driving. A trucker once taking the right lane was understandable but it has become more or less the norm now. has gone,” said Vinod Narayan, a regular motorist.