Reducing road accidents
According to media reports as many as a dozen people were killed and several others injured in separate road accidents in the country on Tuesday. While road accidents are sometimes unavoidable the frequency of accidents in this country has become a cause of great concern. Traffic accidents are a significant cause of any disability, death and economic ruin for families in Bangladesh. Every day people are getting killed and maimed on our roads. It is a given fact that a number of people who go out of home for different reasons do so with the knowledge that some will never return because of traffic accidents. Quite alarmingly, Bangladesh has the second highest number of deaths per 10,000 vehicles in the countries of Asia, Europe and Australia. According to the World Health Organization, the country loses an estimated 1.2 billion pounds due to road accidents per year, equivalent to 2 per cent of the GDP.
The main reasons for road accidents include poor vehicle condition, ignoring traffic rules and instruction marks on roads, signal breaking as well as speeding, use of mobile phones while driving, wrong overtaking, wrong parking, overloading and bad road condition, etc.
The number of traffic accidents can only be reduced if an attempt is made to understand their causes. First, there needs to be properly designed roads and even traffic signs. If either of these is not up to standard, it could be cause for a traffic accident. Of course, the primary reason for traffic accidents is fast and rash driving but that can be checked by vigilant policing. In addition to that, vehicles need to meet the necessary international fitness and road safety standards. Thought also needs to be given to protecting the infrastructure that one finds along roads, since it can be prone to accidents.
Drivers should be punished on a system based on points where beyond a certain number of violations, they lose their licence to drive for a fixed period of time. As for the traffic police, they need to be trained better and should be efficient at not only managing the flow of traffic but also in fining those who break traffic laws.
There is also a dire need for a system where there is prompt reporting of traffic accidents so that emergency services can reach in as short a time as possible. An audit of road safety measures would also help because it will plug weaknesses in the system.
