New strategy needed to end road carnage

-Editorial

Even with stringent traffic rules put in place, accidents continue to occur on our roads at an alarming frequency. While too much emphasis has been placed on the ban on night travel and subjecting drivers to random Alcoblow tests, accidents occurring over the last few weeks show that our priorities could be wrong.

And the Easter period was no exception. And what’s more, most of the reported cases had nothing to do with drivers being drunk. There is more to the accidents than human error. Road design is one major contributor of accidents where slow-moving trucks don’t give way share the lanes with dare-devil drivers with the knack to overtake at blackspots.

In one of the accidents in which 11 people lost their lives, survivors claimed the driver had been speeding and overtook dangerously and declined to heed their calls to slow down.

In light of the recent rules demanding the installation of speed governors on all public service vehicles, how come this particular one appears not to have had one or was fitted with one that could be tampered with? Fingers will still point at the police for corruption. The busy Nairobi – Nakuru highway has been classified as one of the highest killer roads in the world.

Despite the huge volume of traffic on the road, it remains constricted. The expansion of that road with the option of building a special lane for heavy trucks is a viable one.

At some point during his reign, former President Moi’s government prohibited trucks from operating between 6pm and 6 am, with good results. Driver fatigue is one of the most dangerous things on our roads today. At the moment, long distance trucks and lorries appear to have been spared the attention of the new traffic rules. which seem to target only buses and matatus. That needs to be relooked into.