Accidents at level crossings

Last year witnessed the highest number of accidents at level crossings, Parliament was told on Wednesday. Sixty accidents at level crossings were reported in 2009 according to an answer tabled in Parliament. This according to the report was the highest number of accidents at unprotected level crossings in the past 10 years. Twenty persons were killed and 83 injured in these accidents. In other words there had been one accident every three days at an unprotected level crossing somewhere in the country.

At a time when mega development projects are proceeding at full steam one cannot fathom why a simple task such as providing adequate protection at a level crossing cannot be undertaken. It is not as if these are going to cost heaven and earth. Even if that is so no value can be attached to human lives and logically speaking no cost should be spared.

Today with more mobility of the people following the freeing of the country from terrorism there is a bounden duty on the part of the authorities to provide adequate protection on our roads to ensure lives are not lost in vain. This includes smooth traffic flow, cracking the whip on reckless motorists, a curb on speeding and proper safety measures at level crossings etc. But from the above statistics it is clear that those responsible have failed to provide even a simple basic safety measure on our roads. This after the numerous tragedies that have occurred at level crossings sometimes taking the lives of entire families.

This certainly is gross negligence on the part of the authorities concerned. The answer tabled by the Transport Ministry states that signal systems have been installed at only five level crossings from the provisions allocated for it this year and says action is being taken to install gates at level crossings on a priority basis under the limited provision to the Department. This indeed is a telling indictment on the Transport Ministry who periodically takes it upon itself to dutifully report road accident statistics to the media but take no remedial action where it matters.

Does the Ministry expect the public to believe that with such a massive budgetary allocation for transport it has only now started to give priority to erect a few hundred railway gates at unprotected level crossings? Its claim that there are 391 protected level crossings in the country with 59 of them installed with electric bells and signal is little solace. No figures have been given for the unprotected level crossings.

Accidents at level crossings had dominated newspaper headlines frequently in the recent past. But it appears that little remedial action has been taken. The increase in the number of such accidents over the past 10 years is a clear indication of the neglect in this regard. One recalls the orders issued by former President Ranasinghe Premadasa following the Ahungalle tragedy for the installation of Bamboo gates at unprotected level crossings as a temporary safety measure. If this order were followed to the letter then all unprotected level crossings would have had even this primitive protection or an improvement on this by now. But from what we are witnessing even this remedy has not borne results.

Not only level crossing accidents, steps should also be taken to arrest all road accidents in general. Today hardly a day passes without some horrible tragedy reported on our roads. Road accidents are also bound to increase with the massive duty concessions granted for importing vehicles. Today what we see on the roads is the law of the jungle. The worst offenders are the private buses whose cutthroat competition have turned our roads into veritable death traps today. There is no discipline on our highways and even the Police look the other way most probably because some high ranking Police officers also own private buses.

There was once a scheme mooted to make it compulsory for the guilty driver in a road accident to pay the medical bills of the victim in the case of injury and financial compensation to the family in case of death. What has happened to this scheme is anybody's guess. Obviously it is not been implemented. If so, how do we account for the increasing number of road accidents?

Nothing short of an effective deterrent would arrest the rise in the level of road accidents. This should include stiff penalties and even prison terms. Although there are no more deaths now on the roads from terrorist bombings there appears to be other modes of death delivered on our highways by speed fiends and drunk drivers. Such merchants of death should not be spared.