Bus driving simulator inaugurated at chennai

The Transport Department’s responsibility extended beyond buying and maintaining buses and included training of drivers and ensuring road safety, Transport Minister K.N. Nehru said here on Tuesday.

Speaking at the inauguration of the “Bus driving simulator” at the Institute of Road Transport (IRT), Mr. Nehru said that drivers were at fault in nearly 80 per cent of all road accidents.

To reduce the number of accidents, the government had set up driver training schools in 17 places.

The government was now setting up bus driving simulators to provide drivers with standardised training under different traffic and climate conditions, which would ultimately help reduce the number of road accidents, he said.
For driving trainees

The simulator on the IRT campus would be used to train fresh driving trainees and drivers of State-owned transport corporations, especially those who were considered “accident-prone,” could also be given refresher courses, officials at the IRT said. Four such simulators, developed by the “mini ratna” public sector unit BEML at a cost of about Rs.1.4-crore each, were being set up in the State at Chennai, Tiruchi, Madurai and Pollachi.

While the Tiruchi simulator was inaugurated in early June, the others would become functional soon.
Functioning

Providing details of the functioning of the simulator, institute officials said it could be set up for different weather conditions such as snow, dust, clear sky, heavy rain, and for different traffic and road conditions.

The realistic simulation provided six degrees of freedom to simulate pitching and tossing of the vehicle.

There was also a facility to measure the time taken and distance travelled by drivers to stop the vehicle in emergency situations.

These measurements would be helpful especially in training accident-prone drivers identified by State-owned transport corporations, the officials said.

Mr. Nehru was accompanied by Labour Minister T.M. Anbarasan, Transport Secretary Atulya Mishra and Deputy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly V.P. Duraisamy.

After trying out the simulator, Mr. Nehru left for Chromepet in connection with the setting up of the Transport Academy, which he said would be functional in the near future.