ROAD ACCIDENTS IN METROPOLITAN DHAKA, BANGLADESH

This paper mainly addresses the issue of road safety in Dhaka. Injury and fatality rates per 100,000 population have been increasing constantly and the fatality rate per 100,000 vehicles has increased significantly in the past 10 years in the Dhaka metropolitan area. About 85% of road accident victims are male and almost 30% are between the ages of 20 and 39 years. Pedestrians are the worst victims of road accidents, and accounted for 54% deceased and 34% injured. 17% of the fatalities are among the people who died in auto-rickshaw accidents while 11% are among those using a rickshaw. Bus and truck accidents comprise 5% of the deaths caused by city road accidents. The existing pedestrian infrastructure is inadequate and road networks do not meaningfully cater for non-motorized modes. This state of affairs is mainly due to the neglect of pedestrian needs in transport planning. Buses are involved in 25% of all accidents. This is due to poor fitness of the buses to ride them in road networks. Most of the buses start picking-up and dropping-off passengers at any point of passengers' demand. This creates high traffic conflicts for the road users and increased pedestrian accidents. Public awareness to ensure road safety is very much necessary as far as private users of vehicles are concerned. It is educating the drivers of the public transport system, which needs to be given due emphasis. Again, it is most appropriate if the licensing office, namely, the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority took up the task of making sure that defective vehicles do not get their licenses renewed. The police also need to increase their vigilance on a routine basis to detect vehicles operating under a false license as well as weed out defective vehicles, which are accident-prone. (A)