In K-P, many deaths in accidents remain off the grid

In 2014, the number of fatal road accidents stood at 88, as compared to 96 in 2013 and 84 in 2012.

PESHAWAR:

Every year dozens of people are killed in road accidents in Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa (K-P), and its capital Peshawar. In an age when there are various methods to record accidents with full details, in Pakistan it is still limited to registering FIRs. Those too, in most cases, are not registered all.

In 2014, the number of fatal road accidents stood at 88 according to K-P police records, as compared to 96 in 2013 and 84 in 2012. The number of non-fatal accidents was 301 in 2014, as compared to 339 in 2013 and 380 in 2012, as.

Surprising as it may sound but Rescue 1122 is not called for every accident, as in the rural areas most people prefer to act on self-help basis. Even then, the number of road accidents reported to Rescue 1122 in Peshawar district alone is higher than that of the number reported to police in the entire province, indicating that a majority of accidents remain unreported.

DSP Headquarters Traffic Police Asghar Marwat said that lack of law enforcement, a lack of education and bad engineering, in terms of infrastructure, were responsible for the traffic mess and road accidents. “This is called three Es in our terminology,” he said, adding that all these problems were present in Pakistan, and K-P was no exception.

“These drivers do not know about traffic rules, regulations and signs, which is why they make mistakes that often result in fatal road accidents in which innocent people are killed,” he said, adding that traffic engineering was still in infancy in Pakistan which was why roads are not driver-friendly. “There is a rotary on Ring Road in Jamil Chowk. Every night, speeding vehicles collide here due to a lack of traffic signs to warn drivers about the rotary ahead,” he said, adding that there were no bridges in Peshawar where pedestrians could cross roads without interfering with the vehicular traffic.



Earlier, there used to be automatic traffic signals in Shuba Chowk, FC Chowk, Abdara Chowk, Rehman Baba Squire and Phase III Chowk. Majority of these signals have now disappeared, owing to bad governance of the previous governments in the last decade.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2015.