Death toll in highway accidents jumps [ Tritiyo Matra News ]

Death toll in highway accidents jumps

Local February 13, 2017

Death toll in highway accidents has increased all on a sudden, with the authorities and experts blaming reckless driving and lack surveillance for this.
In the past 48 hours since 11:00pm on Friday, at least 49 people died and 101 others injured in 17 road accidents in 13 districts in the country.
At least 13 people were killed and 30 others injured in a head-on collision between a bus and a microbus on Dhaka-Sylhet Highway at Darikandi in Narsingdi on Sunday morning.
On Friday night, 13 people were killed and 20 others injured as a bus and a covered-van collided head-on on Dhaka-Khulna Highway.
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology civil engineering department professor Shamsul Haque said there was no one on the highways to enforce the traffic rules.
‘Reckless drivers are doing everything on road to reach their destinations as fast as possible. But there is none to put them on check,’ he commented.
He said though Bangladesh Road Transport Authority was a regulatory body, not an enforcement agency, it could in no way bypass the blame for faulty and incomplete planning involving route permit, land use, maintenance and movement of unfit vehicles on highways.
Incomplete road safety planning puts extra burden on highway police, he thinks.
Shamsul, also a former director of Accident Research
Institute, said that about 65 per cent of total road accidents occurred on the highways annually.
BRTA director (enforcement) Nazmul Ahsan Majumder said the authorities had only four executive magistrates all over the country right now, who regularly operated mobile courts on different highways.
Highway Police deputy inspector general Md Atiqul Islam, however, citied driving without licence as the main reason behind accidents on highways.
He also blamed the huge gap between registered vehicles and driving license, which allows a large number of unskilled drivers to run vehicles on the highway.
‘There is little to stop vehicles on the highways to check irregularities,’ he said, adding that they, however, regularly checked vehicles and filed cases at different points.
He said, in the backdrop of recent accidents, orders was given to all highway police to remain alert.
Currently the highway police have its network in 42 districts, officials said.
Currently there are about 29 lakh registered vehicles in the country while the number of driving licence is about 16 lakh, according to the BRTA sources.
The High Court Division on January 25 gave fresh directives to the government to make the highways off limits to unfit vehicles and locally-improvised slow moving unauthorised three-wheelers called nasiman, kariman and bhatbhati.
The authorities banned movement of three-wheelers and non-motorised vehicles on 22 highways from August 1, 2015 and fixed the highest speed limit at 80-kilometre for all vehicles on highways to prevent road accidents.