The safety aspects of cycle-rickshaws

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Md Shamsul Arefin The road safety standard of Bangladesh is not up to the mark. It needs to be improved keeping pace with time, as far as possible within the shortest possible time. Accordingly, the appropriate and overall strategy for offsetting the most prevalent types of accidents should be in order of priority based upon severity and frequency of accidents. Moreover conversion of most dominant modes has to be more suitable and safe under the worsening road traffic environment. This should also be a part of the overall strategy -one that may be called a retrofitting strategy. The cycle-rickshaw is the most dominant mode among all other non-motorised traffics all over the country. Called 'Vulnerable Road Users', its passengers are principally unguarded by an external protection. Thus they are susceptible to suffer serious physical injuries in a crash than in case of other modes. As being the most dominant mode, the cycle-rickshaw warrants higher safety priority based on retrofitting strategy to achieve overall improvement of the road safety standard of the country. The retrofitting strategy envisages modification of the existing rickshaw fleets to be much more befitting and withstanding modes against the deteriorating road traffic environment in the country. The rickshaws have retained the same unaltered design features since the inception of this mode in the 19th century. That has rendered it almost unfit on safety ground for reasons of deteriorating road safety record. On the contrary, over this period, most of the motorised traffic has experienced several changes from electrical/mechanical aspects to safety considerations. Accordingly, the rickshaw should have undergone several changes meanwhile, particularly in safety features. Because, now they are encountering much more hostile environment due to increasing number of motorised traffic and very poor enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, in the recent past mishap, where a home-bound mother on board a rickshaw was crushed under the wheel of a bus and furthermore, most recently a college going student was crushed under the wheel of a bus have made it incumbent on vehicle designers to improve the safety features of this muscle power-driven mode of transport. The need is to make rickshaw-pullers as much watchful around its environment as possible for safe riding. The writer is traffic-cum-road safety engineer [email protected]