When will sanity return to our roads?

I, along with my wife and two kids, visited Bangladesh for the first time in 15 years last December. Everything that I had heard about road and infrastructure development in the country while living in the US betrayed me as soon as I started towards my destination in Bashabo from the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. The traffic jam was hellish. I took an Uber the next day, and I wanted to jump out of the vehicle as the driver sped through traffic, and my heart kept leaping out of my chest. It was a constant nightmare to be on the road.

While traveling home from Dhaka, my rental car almost flew off the road after it hit the divider. That mishap could have resulted in a fatal accident, but miraculously we were unhurt. We were about head-on with a truck on another trip when our microbus rolled in front of it suddenly. Because of the menace on the road, I decided to cancel many of the trips I had initially planned.

We cannot let the lunacy on our roads run amok. Our lives matter. The drivers, passengers, and pedestrians who lose their lives in road accidents matter. It is time to stop such nonsense on our roads.

My nightmare came true when two of my family members got badly injured while their CNG driver was driving recklessly a couple of weeks ago. The driver is now dead, but my four-year-old nephew, who was a passenger, was left covered in blood. He was rushed to a hospital where he received stitches all over his head. I wonder how horrific it was for that four-year-old boy to go through that!

In the US, driving under the influence (DUI) causes a large number of deaths every year—13,490 DUI-related deaths of all 40,000 fatalities from road accidents in 2023. Alcohol consumption in Bangladesh is illegal, and unlike the US, it does not have a national DUI crisis. So, how ironic is it to have so many senseless deaths on our roads? Mind you, the US has twice the population as Bangladesh and many times more vehicles.

The US's much lower road fatality rate is due to its safe driving laws and their rigorous application. When at fault, you must take responsibility and not leave the scene until the police arrive or you will face felony charges. Roads are well maintained, and traffic rules are followed. In Bangladesh, there is almost no accountability for the drivers at fault. Fatalities often result in deaths; those who make it to survive are left on their own to deal with the consequences of callous driving. Many bear medical expenses and physical trauma for the rest of their lives without getting compensated for the harm. Lawlessness and anarchy on the road are unnerving, but we seem to have become numb to the daily tragedies.

Egregiously, there are no lanes whatsoever on many roads, giving drivers reckless freedom to manoeuvre, jeopardising lives. Many streets are wide enough to create multi-lane traffic, but there is none. The vehicles run inches apart. Those behind the wheel hardly feel that their lives are at risk because of their callousness.

I saw rickshaw handles knocked over by a passing truck, while the rickshaw puller looked mindlessly. The trucker left as if nothing happened, or maybe he was clueless about what took place. I saw a motorbike driver get knocked down on the road by a car and trying to get back up from under his vehicle to get going. One bus rubbed off the back of another bus defacing it without, luckily, anyone getting hurt.

All the cases above would have involved police, insurance, medical attention, and even arrest if they occurred in the US. However, in Bangladesh, these occurrences seemed to be commonplace. Frightened, my daughters, 14 and 9, who were in Bangladesh for the first time, often recoiled in their seats with their eyes shut during our travels.

We cannot let the lunacy on our roads run amok. Our lives matter. The drivers, passengers, and pedestrians who lose their lives in road accidents matter. It is time to stop such nonsense on our roads.

We do not need new legislation. What we need is strict implementation of our existing regulations, and many of them are very good.

There is a commonly held claim that truck drivers are the real monsters when it comes to road accidents. However, I found that the cars, CNGs, and microbuses that I booked were at fault as well. Therefore, all drivers, when they are at fault, must equally be held accountable.

ABM Uddin is a Senate Analyst for the Florida Legislature.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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