It is good to learn that the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC), in cooperation with 26 service-providing agencies, will launch a crackdown against unfit vehicles and unlicensed drivers, unauthorised rickshaws and parking anomalies from next week.
The drive, as the city fathers say, aims at disciplining the city's chaotic traffic. Constructions encroaching upon public roads will also be demolished. Mobile courts will operate during the cleanup drive in the city.
The DSCC mayor claimed that a recent mobile-court drive against unfit vehicles and drivers who do not have licence helped reduce traffic congestion by about 20-25 per cent.
Traffic congestion is one of the main causes of the sufferings facing the city dwellers. Stuck in tailbacks, many students fail to reach the examinations centres on time while many critical patients can't make it to the hospital due to severe traffic congestion.
It has been a practice for the city fathers to launch such drive giving advance notice for long. As such, the old and ramshackle vehicles get enough time to disappear from the roads temporarily or get a new facelift after denting and painting. Absence of these old buses leaves the commuters' movements in serious jeopardy. Thousands of them wait in the rains and the scorching sun for hours, yet they often fail to get their required transports on various routes.
In fact, the drive against unfit motor vehicles turns into a futile exercise every year. It begins with loud drum-beating by the authorities concerned. As usual, the owners, during the drive, keep their run-down vehicles off the road to avoid penalty. Avoiding crackdown for the whole day, they press their old transports into service on the city roads at night as they know for sure that there would be no mobile courts beyond working hours.
It is important that the government, especially the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC), move forward to deploy additional buses on city routes. The point here is that while drive against dilapidated vehicles is important, it is also vital that the void created by a sudden action against such vehicles is avoided or minimised as much as possible under the given circumstances.
It has been seen that the law-enforcing agencies entrusted with the drive to identify old vehicles create anarchy on the roads by stopping the cars on the roads indiscriminately. Huge traffic jam is seen where a magistrate sits for this purpose. Unholy negotiation with the drivers and the owners to get rid of penalisation is also a common scenario at every point.
It is, however, not only the dilapidated vehicles that should be the purpose of the drive. It should ensure that skilled and trained drivers are behind the wheels of public transports. Their knowledge of road regulations, their behaviour with passengers as also with other road users must be part of the programme.
Unfortunately, drivers running the vehicles with fake licences are thousands in number. Every year, their number is swelling. A section of dishonest officials and employees in the BRTA are responsible for allegedly issuing fake driving licences and fitness certificates to unfit vehicles.
There is another issue that the government may consider. Dhaka city or any other big city in the country is not the abode of only well-off people. Rather mostly middle class or poor people comprise the large majority of the city dwellers. Therefore, any decision to ban old vehicles will harm the easy-going lives of majority of these people.
What the government can do is to give strong emphasis on fitness. If fitness is alright, there is no problem with the old vehicles. There are even vehicles of the '80s which are giving very efficient service due to better maintenance.
In 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020) with the goal to stabilise and reduce predicted levels of road traffic fatalities around the world. The issue has also been included in the country's Sustainable Development Goals with a target to halve traffic deaths and injuries by 2020.
In order to reduce traffic accidents, it is important for the authorities to be strict on fitness and punish those who break traffic rules. This will improve the city's fragile traffic system.
