Some good news is coming in from the Ministry of Transport where it is said that road accidents have experienced a sharp drop.

Up to 36 percent, according to figures made available by the National Gendarmerie last week during a meeting summoned to evaluate the impact of the “Control-Surveillance- Repression” initiative to check road user abuses on highways. This is definitely a very impressive result but authorities of the Ministry of Transport believe the initiative must not only be sustained, but could be improved upon.

This is probably why the ministry yesterday launched another intensive road safety campaign, addressing urban and semi-urban areas specifically. Officials have tended to neglect urban areas in their quest to check road user abuses. And yet accidents in the urban milieu are becoming a great cause for concern because of their growing numbers and the high death toll they take on urban dwellers.

Too often motorists and other road users do not impose the same rigours of behaviour on themselves; thus creating a situation in which many accidents, which could normally have been avoided, occur. The present campaign is also coming after a relatively long period during which controls were off the road.  It is said the long absence was informed by the necessity to streamline the entire campaign and strip it of dishonest elements.

It is said these workers had turned the campaign into a money-fetching adventure as they harassed even law abiding road users, extracting huge sums of money from them for busting imaginary road safety rules. The new campaign is expected to correct these errors and make the exercise more transparent and objective. In this wise, officials have short-listed a number of crimes for which road users can be fined or punished. Each crime has a corresponding fine and no one in control teams will be able to impose a fine which is not listed in the document which itself is available to the road user for verification.

This measure is expected to give the exercise more credibility with even more encouraging results awaited in the fight to make our roads safer.