Will we ever take road crashes seriously?
It's no surprise that one constant feature of the tumultuous year that 2021 has been was the upward trend in road crashes and casualties, caused mostly by faulty vehicles, reckless driving, and inadequate traffic systems. As per data from the Road Safety foundation (based on newspaper reports), at least 413 people were killed in road crashes in November, while the number rose to 418 in December. Such data is especially disheartening given that, after the Road Safety Movement of 2018, students were again forced to take to the streets to demand safer roads during these months, prompted by the killing of a college student on November 24 by a DSCC vehicle in Gulistan.
While there are some straightforward reasons as to why road accidents continue to occur, we cannot ignore some of the more complex and underlying causes of the rise in accidents. The most glaring of these is perhaps the government's apparent apathy towards these incidents, which is reflected in the sluggish progress in implementing the Road Transport Act 2018. Over the last three years, the Act has been kept in draft form while being amended as per the demands of transport owners and workers.
As recently as December 19, 2021, the road transport and bridges ministry issued a circular relaxing the experience requirements for obtaining driving licences for heavy and medium vehicles. This was something that transport workers had demanded while protesting the Act in 2019, and while the government had relaxed the experience requirement in August 2018, the tenure of this has been extended several times since. This is despite the fact that research has seen a growing involvement of heavy vehicles in road crashes in part due to this relaxation of regulations. This is but one example of how the government has bowed, again and again, to the whims and demands of transport owners, to the obvious detriment of ordinary passengers.
With deaths increasing on the roads at such rates, we would urge the authorities—as we have done repeatedly in this column—to prioritise the implementation of the Road Transport Act 2018 to improve road safety. Not only should the Act be amended in the right spirit, if amendment must be done, without any concessions given to the pressure groups, it should also be implemented rigorously if we are to see a decrease in deaths caused by road crashes.
Comments