Daily Times

A deadly bus accident claimed 13 lives and injured an additional 30 people near Kallar Kahar when a bus swerved off the Lahore-Islamabad motorway into an opposite lane and flipped over. It was later discovered that the bus wasn’t fit to travel long distances, prompting authorities to lodge a criminal complaint lodged against the driver, bus owner and the manager of Rawalpindi station from where the bus departed. Indeed, in the absence of traffic law enforcement, accidents of this nature have grown increasingly common on Pakistani roads, gripping our collective conscience for a brief moment only to be forgotten shortly after until the next one makes its way into the news cycle.

While most road accidents take place in crowded and haphazardly built urban areas, they have become increasingly common on our highways too, even seemingly safe ones like the Islamabad-Lahore motorway. Overworked drivers, dilapidated vehicles, bumpy and uneven roads and over-speeding are all responsible for this increased incidence-it is uncommon to hear about vehicles swerving off the road, bumping into trees or even plunging into ditches. It doesn’t help that those responsible for enforcing the rules-the police, whose presence on the motorway is sparse, to begin with-are also largely incompetent and can never muster the willpower to enforce speed checks, even going as far as to extort bribes from truckers, vans and bus drivers. Inspecting vehicles to make sure they have the necessary certification is even less common.

Thousands of people encounter deadly situations on the road daily but law enforcement institutions continue to overlook the facts, preferring to let their citizens handle things themselves. To put things in perspective, more people have lost their lives in road accidents than to terrorism in Pakistan or even the coronavirus pandemic. The cost of fatalities and injuries in economic terms is unfathomably large; estimated to be in the billions, which is inexcusable for a country that is teetering on the edge of economic oblivion. Until we begin treating traffic accidents as a public health epidemic, we have no chance of minimising the casualties they inflict-that means making a concerted effort to reform the sentencing mechanisms both for people violating the rules. *