483 lives lost on terrible road crashes in Nov
Staff Reporter :
Bangladesh recorded 534 road accidents last November, killing 483 people including 64 women and 71 children and injuring 1,317 others.
Motorcycles were deadliest, with 227 crashes claiming 194 lives, while 106 pedestrians also died. Six waterway mishaps killed 7 and left 5 missing; 47 rail-track incidents killed 38 and injured 9.
Daily fatalities rose from October’s average of 14.22 to November’s 16.1 a 13.22per cent increase. The data comes from Road Safety Foundation Executive Director Saidur Rahman’s report, published Thursday (December 18) and based on 9 national dailies, 7 online portals, electronic media, and their own sources.
Victim breakdown by vehicle are recorded – motorcycle riders and passengers (194); three-wheeler passengers (CNG, easybike, etc.) (83); bus passengers (24); trucks or covered vans or tractors etc (22); local vehicles (nasimon, bhattbhatti etc) (31); private car or microbus passengers (14) and rickshaw or bicycle riders (9).
Crash locations are mainly recorded in national highways, regional roads, rural roads, urban roads, head-on collisions, loss of control, pedestrian hits, rear-end crashes, others.
Dhaka division saw the most (141 accidents, 119 deaths); Sylhet the least (30 accidents, 24 deaths). Chittagong district topped single districts (41 accidents, 37 deaths); Sherpur and Panchagarh had fewest (9 accidents, 2 deaths each).
The main causes are mainly – faulty vehicles or roads, reckless speeding, unfit or incompetent drivers, undefined wages or hours, slow vehicles on highways, youth motorcycle stunts, traffic law ignorance, weak enforcement, BRTA shortcomings, and transport extortion.
Boosting driver training, fixing wages or hours, strengthening BRTA, enforcing laws strictly, banning slow vehicles on highways with service roads, installing dividers on all highways, ending transport extortion, reforming rail or waterways to ease road load, adopting sustainable transport policy, and fully implementing Road Transport Act 2018 are the main key solutions at the edge of this national curse of Bangladesh, road crashes.