Fog, folly and fatalities

Fog is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the mornings and evenings every year in Punjab. The winter months are the times of greatest prevalence, and almost any morning between early December and late January will see fog somewhere in Punjab. Given that this is a regularly occurring phenomenon, the people of Punjab seem to treat it as a major surprise every time it happens and proceed to make the same mistakes that they made in the previous year and the year before that and the year before that. As far as fog goes, the national learning curve appears to have flat-lined. As a consequence, vehicles are driven at speeds that are entirely inappropriate given that visibility may be less than 50 feet, lights are not dipped and fog lights rarely fitted.

Unsurprisingly, there are accidents, some of them mass-casualty/fatality and despite the best efforts of such traffic police as there are, the motoring public blithely goes on its way as if the fog simply did not exist. The motorway police learned a lesson long ago and sensibly closed the motorways until visibility is restored, usually by mid-morning, in an effort to prevent drivers from pressing the self-destruct button. Driving standards are abysmally low across the country, and adding fog to the mix considerably inflates the body count. Air travel is also disrupted, but airline pilots at least have a set of international guidelines as to when it is and is not safe to take off. As has been noted in these columns several times in recent months, there is a lack of a safety culture in Pakistan. This cuts across every aspect of life from the home to the workplace to the roads and agricultural equipment or industrial processes. A start could be made by introducing a road safety module into the national curriculum, to begin in the early years of the education of every child and continue at increasing levels of sophistication until they leave. Fog is a killer, but it does not have to be and a little education can go a long way.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd,  2015.

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