Ghana: Let’s Prioritise Actions for Highway Security!!
Sympathies to the households of the individuals who misplaced their lives in an accident at Gomoa Okyereko on the Accra-Cape Coast freeway yesterday and speedy restoration to the injured receiving remedy on the hospital. (See our lead story).
The story raises three essential points that often relate to accidents within the country– the character of the nation’s roads, driver misbehaviour and the dearth of passenger energy to examine errant drivers.
The truth that the accident is a head-on collision involving a bus and a gas tanker, clearly from reverse instructions, means the character of the street is an issue.
The bus was from Abidjan in the direction of Accra whereas the tanker was travelling from Accra in the direction of Takoradi.
The street from Abidjan towards Accra is the one and similar single-lane street one travels in the direction of Abidjan with locations like Kasoa, Winneba, Mankessim, Cape Coast, Takoradi and Elubo on it.
Actually, it’s a part of the Trans-West African Coastal Freeway, a transnational freeway stretching from Nouakchott in Mauritania within the west to Lagos in Nigeria within the east and a busy one at that.
Each nation on it’s anticipated to reconstruct its portion, in response to the associated protocol.
This implies by this time, Ghana ought to have reconstructed its portion right into a twin carriageway a minimum of, to cut back the accident dangers on it.
That can also be to say that the nation ought to have reconstructed all of the busy highways within the nation into twin carriageways with over-passes, the place wanted, to cut back accidents and visitors congestion.
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Let’s take inventory of roads within the nation on which street crashes often happen such on the Accra-Kumasi freeway, one other stretch of a transnational freeway for our landlocked neighbours like Burkina Faso and Mali, and we might realise that the only lane nature of such highways has change into a critical danger consider street accidents within the nation.
It’s higher late than by no means and so the federal government ought to reconstruct such roads and save lives.
The lack of each productive and budding lives and the implications are too dire for households, communities and the nation at massive.
Apart from the advance of the roads, the federal government should persist in its efforts to offer services for different technique of transport, significantly the rail.
As already hinted, the second subject arising out of the Okyereko accident is driver misbehaviour.
If eyewitnesses’ account that the Yutong bus driver was feeling sleepy and sometimes veered off his lane all by means of the journey is the case, then the motive force didn’t regard security guidelines.
He was drained and so will need to have rested for a while or handed over the management of the automobile to a second driver.
Today we hear business buses happening lengthy journeys have second or assistant drivers. Did the Yutong bus driver have one?
We reiterate our stance that there have to be strict legal guidelines to examine driver misbehaviour similar to convicting a surviving driver of manslaughter if he’s discovered to have triggered an accident wherein even only a life was misplaced.
Our final concern regards the dearth of a regulation to empower passengers to, a minimum of, persuade a drive to obey security guidelines.
It’s about time passengers too had been empowered to play an necessary function in street security.
