Editorial
Wailing amidst accidents galore
Recommended preventive measures gather dust
AS of Sunday, 56 persons died in road accidents and by drowning during Eid holidays. This is besides the casualties at Brahmanbaria over a small tiff regarding passage through a bridge, fatally hurling of a stone at the head of a lady engineer sitting by the window on a running train and the motorbike with three on board ploughing through a young couple and her 6-month toddler thrown underneath a whirring motorbike wheel. All these conjure up human lives teetering at the edge of dire insecurity accentuating by the year.
In all of these just as slack in law enforcement in to blame, there is a missing element of civic responsibility on two counts: First, the tendency to take law into one's own hand; and secondly, the failure to properly assess risks, overt and covert in public journeys these days. On a correct assessment of the risk factors depends fending off accidents through preventative precautions.
Most of the road accidents were caused by man-made factors: The buses and trucks were overloaded, variegated transports either collided head-on or fell into roadside ditch, mostly due to over-speeding. The number of pedestrians being overrun has markedly increased. The roadside encroachments dangerously impede constricted two-lane highway traffic.
These are ills that will begin to be addressed meaningfully if we have an adequate highway patrol mechanism coupled with local public accident resistance committees working in tandem with both police and transport operators.
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