Road safety issues

THERE is no denying that serious problems and impediments to road safety both on the highways and the cities exist. We are informed that there are three separate committees involved in coming up with constructive steps which authorities need to implement to bring about an improvement in this area. Yet, year after year, nothing changes due to the fact that many of these committees fail to sit on a regular basis and their recommendations are simply ignored.

We are appalled at this lack of interest in implementing action plans that have been drawn up from 1997 to 2011 which deal with everything from road engineering, traffic legislation, traffic law enforcement, driver training and tests to education and publicity. That good decisions have been taken in the past is not in question. What is in question is the will to implement those decisions by agencies entrusted with the issue of safety on roads.

Although official statistics put road accident casualties at 3,000 per annum, unofficial figures published by the World Bank and the World Health Organisation put them anywhere from 12,000 to 18,000 per year. These are serious casualty rates which could certainly be reduced drastically if authorities put their mind to fixing some of the most obvious problems, like the already identified 144 accident prone spots around the country. There is hardly any excuse for non-performance on solving problems that are costing thousands of unnecessary deaths and loss of private property which could be drastically reduced.