Road Safety and Us

We all know and understand that death is an eventual certainty for all human beings. However, the human race must make sincere efforts towards minimizing deaths due to non-natural reasons such as accidents. Loss of lives in accidents play havoc on the families of those involved. Road safety considerations play an important role in ensuring the above.

Making Our Roads Safer

How to make our roads safer? Some thoughts:

• Make stringent safety guidelines for certification of vehicles - minimum level of safety standards should be enforced on all vehicle manufacturers
• Make stringent norms for allowing anyone to earn the privilege to drive. Being allowed to freely drive cannot be granted as a fundamental right.
• Have stringent checks on driving disciplines. Certain traffic violations should be penalized heavily like lane cutting, driving in wrong lane or direction, drunken driving, non-maintenance of vehicle, jumping red lights. These violations increase the risk of accidents exponentially and hence must be dealt with a firm hand.
• Fitting of vehicles with automated speed governors. These governors will be sensor-based and provide warning to the driver about over-speeding.
• Improve public transportation which leads to lesser clogging on the roads and hence lesser opportunities for accidents.

Improving Road Safety

What is the way forward? Many countries already have stringent road safety standards. For such countries better enforcement is the way forward. For countries which still have to adopt stringent road safety standards, there is a need for them to consider their adoption at the earliest.