National Road Safety Day today
Road safety experts claim
FE Team
| Published: October 21, 2023 22:13:55
FE Report
The National Road Safety Day is set to be observed in the country for the seventh consecutive year today (Sunday), amid continuing challenges in ensuring safe movement of people and vehicles.
This year the theme is: ‘Let’s abide by traffic rules and build smart Bangladesh’. Bangladesh has been observing the day since 2017 to bring discipline in the roads and highways to prevent road accidents.
The daily average deaths from road accidents would be around 22, but the casualties would be three times higher during treatment in hospital, according to different data available.
Accident Research Institute data show that the country’s losses due to road accidents would be over Tk 1.09 trillion during the last three years. To mark the day, various organisations including Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) will hold various programmes to create awareness about road safety among all concerned.
These include discussion meetings, rallies, distributing leaflets at bus terminals, releasing posters, publishing special supplements and holding media talk shows.
BRTA will organise a procession in the city and hold a discussion at Osmani Auditorium in the city.
Marking the occasion, the Passenger Welfare Association of Bangladesh (PWAB) and Road Safety Foundation (RSF) organised a joint press conference on Saturday, raising an allegation that the government was not taking realistic programmes to ensure road safety.
Mozammel Haque Chowdhury of PWAB alleged that the road safety issues have been confined only within the talk shows, but there is hardly any research on it.
Meanwhile, another press conference, jointly organised by RSF and Road Safety Watch.com at the RSF office in the city on the day, expressed frustration over huge spending on mega infrastructure projects that they thought would hardly mitigate the traffic congestion in Dhaka. These projects like metro rail, subways, expressways, and flyovers would require an investment of around Tk 9.0 trillion, but would serve only less than one-third of the surface passengers.
The effectiveness of these huge investments remain uncertain, speakers said at the press conference titled “Dialogue on public transport management and road safety”, adding that an investment of only Tk 100-120 billion on public transport buses would have better served the purpose. RSF Chairman Prof Dr AI Mahbub Uddin Ahmed presented a keynote paper, saying that basically there is no sustainable transport strategy in the country.
There is an opportunist group in the road transport sector which is the key obstacle to enforcing law and order in the road transport sector, according to the paper.
However, by allocating a budget of Tk 100-120 billion, it would be possible to replace all the outdated buses across the capital with 4,000 modern buses of three different categories. RSF executive director Saidur Rahman said that the completed and ongoing infrastructures including metrorail, subways, expressways, elevated ways, etc might cost the government Tk 9.0 trillion while the bus-based transport system would require hardly Tk 120 billion.
smunima@yahoo.com
tonmoy.wardad@gmail.com