Progress ties in wheel,
That's supposed to be real.
Things have changed in this part,
It's no longer the horse before the cart.
People get stuck in the sea of cars
Have this weird feeling of behind the bars.
Here the wheel moves not to serve you sir,
But to whiten the black money in their coffer.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to move around Dhaka. Traffic jam slowly kills a vibrant city. City of lights and city of green gradually gives in to a long anaconda of standstill traffic at key roundabouts and key roads most of the day. Nowadays people fret over it less. They are getting used to this new normal. I am no exception. But last week, an hour-long traffic jam in less-than-half-a-kilometer-long road whipped up the anger inside me. Lots of people blame ongoing metro-work for Dhaka's traffic jam. Frankly speaking, metro-work is causing less jam in Dhaka. Rather, its alternate passages better manage the vehicular movement. Lack of policing is to blame. Most of the traffic jams I got stuck were caused by events or bad police handling. Recent awful experience was no different. Hardly any police was there in those agonizing 60 minutes in that stretch of Agargaon-Farmgate road. Well, it was the final day of the trade fair but that did not mean less police on the spot.
I looked around in that sardin-packed bus and watched how people got stuck in a sea of vehicles around me.No one would believe that a bus-ride from Agargaon to Farmgate took 1-hour. I was befuddled to notice that other side of the road leading to Farmgate at Bangabandhu Conference Center crossing was completely empty and there was no police at the crossing.
Like traffic jams, Dhaka roads also witness frequent accidents. Reckless driving coupled with lack of policing make Dhaka roads hell for commuters.
Last year I had witnessed one such accident that I narrowly escaped. My bus was boarding passengers while an empty bus intentionally hit the rear side of the bus. That was where I sat. In the blink of an eye, it smashed the back of the bus. It took few seconds to befuddled passengers to understand what was going on. I got off and took few snaps of the assailant bus on my mobile phone. Two days later I went to the police station where seized bus was parked outside.
I filed a general diary and tried to know the identity of the owner. To my surprise, I came to learn that there were many owners of that bus company. Maybe 400 or 500. Even a single bus is owned by several people, as disclosed by the claimed owner of the bus. The transport businesses is all about to mainstream or whiten the undocumented money. The accident took place the very next day of the brutal murder of a BUET student. Two-month after I had lodged the diary, the bus was no longer before the police station. Maybe they released the bus.
As the number of vehicle plying over the road increases, so does the number of accident. Addition of new car and bus will not stop. Similarly, new asphalt roads are also being stretched out. But how can we reduce the incidence of growing number of accidents? Reducing the number of vehicle is not a pragmatic solution. Better traffic management and responsible driving could be the possible solution.
Despite the official-unofficial difference, there is no gainsaying that there has been a surge in accident between 2015 and 2018. This post does not intend to probe underlying reasons for the sudden rise in accidents. Rather it tries to underscore the gravity of the problem.
I transformed the two into natural log variables and then ran a regression between ln_casualty and ln_registered_vehicle. Since the data is time series in nature, I checked for serial correlation in the disturbance term. Luckily Durbin-Watson statistic reported no autocorrelation. (d=1.8382 prior to log natural transformation and d= 1.3638 after regression; for 10 observations and 1 explanatory variable.)
Having finished for diagnostic check, I went for analyzing the result. F-test was found to be significant(F=7.207, p= 0.027, df=1,8).Coefficient for ln_registered_vehicle turned out to be statistically significant(b2=1.37, t=2.68, p=0.027). However, the intercept was found to be statistically insignificant (b1=-10.948, t=-1.468, p=1.800).
From the given data, it appears that a 1% increase in registered vehicle contributes to a 1.37% increase in casualty number.
Certainly, I am not saying increasing number of vehicle provokes accident. The point is reckless driving and lack of enforcement of law aggravate the road accident problem. An array of posts could be churned out on what the traffic laws say. Since the objective is to capture the gravity of the problem, I am not treading that path and restrict my discussion on how worse it has become.
As we embrace the new normal on unruly roads--- unending traffic jam, agonizing working hours lost in roads, misfit drivers and vehicles, undocumented money whitening project, no respect for law---the truth is becoming clear that educating the driver , people is as relevant as enforcing the law. At the same time, all the corrupt practices, including the black money whitening project, should be put to an end without further ado.
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