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Road disaster: Audit probe reveals serious safety lapses
A national audit into road safety has found serious shortcomings, including untrained traffic police, behind increasing accidents which have led to more than 25,000 deaths between 2007 and 2016.
The audit also saw vast discrepancies, running into thousands, between the number of accidents reported to police and those recorded by insurance companies. For instance, in 2013, the Police noted down 37,877 accidents, while insurance companies had a figure of 492,534–a difference of more than 450,000.
The previous year, the police recorded 42,088 accidents and insurance companies recorded 566,127. This is a gap of nearly 525,000.
These data disparities existed despite the Motor Traffic Ordinance mandating insurers to report accidents to police.
Twenty-five percent of patients admitted to the National Hospital were accident victims, says the Auditor General’s report into functions of Government entities dealing road safety. And 75 percent of them were between the ages of 15 and 45.
The audit looked at the National Council on Road Safety (NCRS), the Police Motor Traffic Division (PMTD), the Department of Motor Traffic (DMT) and Road Development Authority (RDA). Questionnaires were also sent to 41 Police Motor Traffic Divisions around the country.
Alarmingly, out of 7,041 officers attached to these divisions, 72 percent had not followed the senior or junior motor traffic management courses at the time of the research. And the reason was elementary: lack of space. The PMTD had an area of just 20×30 square feet as a training hall and another of 8×8 square feet as a training office. Only 40 officers could be trained at a time.
Between 2015 and 2017, just 180 officers followed the senior motor traffic management course, 562 followed the junior motor traffic management course, 87 did the one-day course and 104 completed the two-day course. The training unit also had insufficient accommodation and equipment.
There were other issues. For instance, the NCRS had neither facilities nor personnel. It functioned under the Transport Ministry, the audit said, and had just 11 officers from the Department of Railways and Sri Lanka Transport Board, another on contract and a casual worker. A Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) recommendation to convert the NCRS into a national commission has gone ignored.
The NCRS was tasked with establishing a database of road accidents. It is now operated by the PMTD headquarters but the NCRS, DMT, the Ministry of Health or insurance companies are not linked to it and could not access the data. This means there is neither accurate analyses nor snapshot of the road safety situation in Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, the RDA has failed to carry out road safety audits despite having sufficient engineers in service. Experts have said road conditions were a key factor in accidents. And the road network in Sri Lanka had not improved when compared with the speed of vehicle registration.
The PMTD did not check the standard and running condition of school vans, the audit observed. Motor traffic instruction circulars issues in 2013 and 2014 stated that police must inspect school vans once in three months. But, of 5,296 school vans available across ten police divisions in 2015, only 3,126 had been checked.
Driving schools did not renew their licences annually with the DMT as mandated to do so, the audit said. There were 969 of them by December 2017 and 49 percent had not renewed their registration within the specified period.
Road accident data in the last eight years show that 23 percent of serious injuries and 31 percent of deaths were of pedestrians. Accidents also occurred when passengers were embarking or disembarking from buses, missing a step or crossing the road near a bus stop. Recommendations that bus stands should be in suitable places have not been followed. A large number of accidents took place owing to pedestrian crossings being near bus stand intersections, the audit said.
According to road safety standards, there must be electric lights up to a distance of 50km from Colombo on A1, A2, A3 and A4 roads. All highways must also be lit. But an audit test carried out in 2017 showed even this to be very much in the breach.