LAHORE: The Lahore’s traffic police has been told to stop issuing warnings and start issuing tickets. Chief Traffic Officer Lahore Syed Abdul Raheem Sherazi directed officers on Tuesday to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on traffic violations, telling a meeting of the city’s traffic hierarchy that better management of the roads and the safety of people using them are now the department’s twin priorities.
According to an official meeting, both Senior Superintendents of Police and all circle officers attended the session chaired by the CTO. Sherazi briefed them on the Punjab Chief Minister’s “Safe Road, Safe Punjab” vision and issued instructions aimed at making the city’s traffic system more effective on the ground rather than on paper.
The sharpest instruction of the meeting concerned helmets. Sherazi held sector in-charges and DSPs directly accountable for weak enforcement in their areas, stating that no motorcyclist should be seen in Lahore riding without a helmet or breaking lane discipline. Lane-line violations and overloading, he said, would not be tolerated in any form.
The CTO also ordered a fresh review of traffic arrangements at all of the city’s entry and exit routes — the arteries where inter-district traffic meets Lahore’s own congestion and where breakdowns tend to cascade across the network for hours.
A strict crackdown was ordered against goods carriers and vehicles hauling sand, soil and other loose material without covering. No tractor-trolley or loader vehicle should be operating on city roads without a tarpaulin, Sherazi said. He further directed that the licences of all commercial drivers be checked — an instruction that sits alongside a wider provincial crackdown on unlicensed commercial drivers launched the same day.
Zero-tolerance drives are announced in Lahore with some regularity, and the variable is never the announcement but the follow-through once the first fortnight of heavy ticketing passes. By naming sector in-charges and DSPs as the accountable layer rather than leaving responsibility with individual wardens, Tuesday’s meeting shifted the pressure upwards — a structural change that will be easier to audit than a general instruction to be strict.
Officers also agreed to run an awareness campaign for pedestrians crossing roads on foot, and to install warning boards at selected points across the city. Enforcement, the meeting concluded, has to be paired with public information if behaviour is to change.
Motorcycles make up the overwhelming share of Lahore’s registered vehicles and the overwhelming share of its road-crash casualties, which is why helmet compliance and lane discipline have become the two measures traffic managers keep returning to. Sherazi closed by instructing his officers to ensure strict implementation, public convenience and a safer travelling environment on the roads of Lahore.
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