Road accidents and their costs
Monday, 31 May 2010
A spate of road accidents all in the space of only a day or twenty-four hours must have shocked all concerned in the country. Two meritorious students –– one, a new entrant to the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and the other, a civil engineering student of a Dhaka-based private university –– were crushed under the wheels of buses at Dhaka and Tangail respectively in two separate incidents on last Thursday. The incidents trigged violent rage among the classmates of the dead ones leading to torching of several buses and other forms of rioting. The counts of the dead and injured on Thursday were not only limited to these two. 18 persons were reported dead and 62 injured from road accidents elsewhere in the country on the same day. The tally is a shocking one and revealing of the tragedies resulting from inconsolable losses of human life as well as destruction of properties from such accidents.
Road accidents in Bangladesh claim on an average 12,000 lives annually and lead to about 35,000 injuries. The annual fatality rate from road accidents in Bangladesh is 85.6 per 10,000 vehicles which contrasts poorly even with 47.7 in Myanmar and 62.7 in Nepal. The fatality rate in Bangladesh from road accidents specially contrasts with the developed countries where the rate is below 3 per 10,000 vehicles. Thus, one should realise why Bangladesh is ranked as one of the most road accident-prone countries of the world. The national cost estimates for road accidents in Bangladesh is Taka 70 billion, which is about 1.5 per cent of the GDP and three times the annual expenditures of the Roads and Highway Department. Thus, it needs no explanation why it is imperative to go all-out to prevent the accidents from happening.
The first area of prevention must be improvement of the enforcement of traffic laws. The traffic police department must be made truly motivated to apply the rules with an eye for catching the offenders such as vehicles that overload, engage in speeding or the operators who do not maintain their vehicles.
The training of drivers ought to be under rigorous inspection. Drivers are known to get their licenses too easily in Bangladesh through bribery. Thus, even drivers with legitimate licenses in many cases are otherwise not dependable as they have got their licenses without going through proper tests to establish their fitness. According to one assessment, the number of licensed drivers is some 0.9 million. But some 0.4 million are driving without proper licenses or no licenses at all. This alone should put into sharp focus one of the main causes of road accidents from untrained or poorly trained drivers operating freely on the roads.
This practice must be put to an end and also the corruption in certifying vehicles as fit for movement in exchange of bribes. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles long past their operating life are seen on the roads. It is incredible but a fact that many of them do not even approach the authorities for renewing their fitness certificates but mange as and when necessary by bribing the traffic policemen on the roads. Sometimes, these vehicles get fitness certificates and also renew them through similar bribery at the offices of Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA). It should be obvious why the sternest of steps need to be taken to take these unfit vehicles off the roads for eliminating their accident-making potentials.
Stricter laws need to be made and those laws must be properly enforced to curb the menace of reckless driving which quite often causes deaths on the roads.
Road accidents in Bangladesh claim on an average 12,000 lives annually and lead to about 35,000 injuries. The annual fatality rate from road accidents in Bangladesh is 85.6 per 10,000 vehicles which contrasts poorly even with 47.7 in Myanmar and 62.7 in Nepal. The fatality rate in Bangladesh from road accidents specially contrasts with the developed countries where the rate is below 3 per 10,000 vehicles. Thus, one should realise why Bangladesh is ranked as one of the most road accident-prone countries of the world. The national cost estimates for road accidents in Bangladesh is Taka 70 billion, which is about 1.5 per cent of the GDP and three times the annual expenditures of the Roads and Highway Department. Thus, it needs no explanation why it is imperative to go all-out to prevent the accidents from happening.
The first area of prevention must be improvement of the enforcement of traffic laws. The traffic police department must be made truly motivated to apply the rules with an eye for catching the offenders such as vehicles that overload, engage in speeding or the operators who do not maintain their vehicles.
The training of drivers ought to be under rigorous inspection. Drivers are known to get their licenses too easily in Bangladesh through bribery. Thus, even drivers with legitimate licenses in many cases are otherwise not dependable as they have got their licenses without going through proper tests to establish their fitness. According to one assessment, the number of licensed drivers is some 0.9 million. But some 0.4 million are driving without proper licenses or no licenses at all. This alone should put into sharp focus one of the main causes of road accidents from untrained or poorly trained drivers operating freely on the roads.
This practice must be put to an end and also the corruption in certifying vehicles as fit for movement in exchange of bribes. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles long past their operating life are seen on the roads. It is incredible but a fact that many of them do not even approach the authorities for renewing their fitness certificates but mange as and when necessary by bribing the traffic policemen on the roads. Sometimes, these vehicles get fitness certificates and also renew them through similar bribery at the offices of Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA). It should be obvious why the sternest of steps need to be taken to take these unfit vehicles off the roads for eliminating their accident-making potentials.
Stricter laws need to be made and those laws must be properly enforced to curb the menace of reckless driving which quite often causes deaths on the roads.