Two killed as wrong-side car collides with two-wheeler on Delhi-Meerut highway
Both vehicles were violating traffic rules – the car was being driven on the wrong side of the road, while entry of two-wheelers is banned on DME
A mother and son were killed after their two-wheeler collided head on with a Maruti Alto car being driven on the wrong side of the Delhi-Meerut Expressway (DME) stretch in Ghaziabad late Sunday evening.
Senior police officers said the two on the scooter suffered critical injuries and succumbed within a couple of hours of reaching the hospital.
Police said that the collision took place around 7.35pm on Sunday and the incident was captured by CCTV cameras on the expressway. The video shows a scooter moving towards Ghaziabad in the extreme right lane while a white car is seen approaching it from the wrong side, crashing into the scooter head-on within seconds.
Police estimate that the Maruti Alto was travelling at a speed of 40-50km/hour when it hit the scooter, which they believe was going at about 60-70km/hour.
To be sure, both vehicles were violating traffic rules – the car was being driven on the wrong side of the road, while entry of two-wheelers is banned on DME, said senior traffic officials.
Police said the scooter was driven by Yash Gautam, 20, while his mother Manju Gautam, 40, was riding pillion. They added that both were coming from Meerut on the Meerut-Ghaziabad carriageway of DME, and were proceeding to their home in Delhi’s West Vinod Nagar.
Police said the errant car driver was arrested by the police soon after the incident and identified as Dev Dutt Kumar, a resident of Vijay Nagar in Ghaziabad.
Senior police officers said the driver of the car apparently made an illegal u-turn on the access-controlled expressway after he got confused about which exit to take.
“The mother and son on the scooter entered the DME lanes from Meerut and were headed towards Delhi. When they reached an overbridge near Mehrauli, their speeding two-wheeler was hit head-on by a wrong-side driven Alto car, which was also speeding. The scooter suffered significant damages and two riders suffered severe injuries. Police teams rushed them to a hospital where they succumbed late night, after a couple of hours of treatment,” said Poonam Mishra, assistant commissioner of police, Wave City, on Monday.
The police later seized the two vehicles. The front section of the Alto was also damaged. Police said the driver of the car was saved as the air bags deployed on impact.
“We have arrested the car driver and are in the process of registering an FIR. During questioning, the car driver told us that he was headed towards Vijay Nagar from Meerut side on DME, and he got confused about the exit from the expressway. Then, he took a U-turn on the expressway and started driving on the wrong side on the same carriageway towards Meerut. But, he ended up hitting the scooter head-on midway. We are trying to ascertain from CCTV footage, the point from where the car driver made a U-turn,” Mishra said.
“Two-wheelers are not allowed on expressway lanes. The scooter involved in accident was coming from Meerut and it entered the expressway from NHAI’s toll plaza near Partapur. The toll/NHAI staff should have stopped them from proceeding further. Deployment of traffic police personnel on expressway is risky, and it is not possible to immediately detect violations and stop errant vehicles on the high-speed lanes of the DME,” said Veerendra Kumar Singh, additional deputy commissioner of police (traffic).
The traffic police also conducted an on-the-spot assessment of the accident site and said the scooter rider was wearing a helmet while the woman riding pillion was not.
On July 11, 2023, a bus speeding on the wrong side hit an SUV coming from Meerut near Vijay Nagar in Ghaziabad. The head-on collision killed six people of a family travelling in their SUV.
NHAI officials said the traffic police is tasked to regulate and enforce traffic norms on expressways.
“Our staff at toll plaza (in Meerut) try to stop two-wheelers from entering expressway lanes but many do so forcibly. We are trying to procure CCTV footages of the accident from Sunday night for further analysis,” said a NHAI officials, asking not to be named.