Effectiveness of Driving License in Bangladesh from Road Safety Perspective

Abstract

Road traffic accidents and injuries have now emerged as a serious man-made epidemic with an estimated 1.3 million people killed and as many as 50 million injured worldwide each year. It is a rear event that road accidents accrue from a single cause. There are usually a myriad of causative factors that might have caused a road accident at any given point of time. Researchers estimated that around 90% of all causative factors involve road users of which drivers are the principal controlling elements. Accidents are particularly prevalent in low and middle income countries- around 85 percent of the world’s deaths occur in developing countries like Bangladesh. Traffic accidents in Bangladesh have been increasing rapidly causing a huge amount of economic burden in terms of death, injury, lost productivity and property damage. Pedestrian-vehicle conflicts are clearly the greatest problem with significant involvement of Trucks and Buses. Licensed driving remains a serious problem for road safety, despite ongoing improvements in traffic law enforcement practice and technology. While it does not play a direct causative role in road crashes, licensed driving undermines the integrity of the driver licensing system and is associated with high risk behavior. Drivers are classified into three groups: (a) took no test; (b) took some tests; (c) took all tests. This thesis documents three groups that were undertaken to explore the scope and nature of licensed driving, in order to develop more effective countermeasures to the behavior and attitude. The need for more systemic behavioral studies seems apparent, particularly to develop a factual and comprehensive database for devising effective accident countermeasure. In order to gather factual information to serve as a basis for this study, a well-conceived questionnaire survey was conducted on the attitude and behavior of heavy vehicles drivers. The research also investigates the knowledge of the drivers about the Traffic rules and inspects the condition of the vehicles. Considering all the facts of involvement of heavy vehicles (buses and trucks) driver and compare among the heavy vehicle drivers to explain the attitude, behaviors of license drivers; discusses the possible solutions to improve the continuously deteriorating situation. The study focuses on the striking findings of the research with a view to assessing the need for taking appropriate countermeasures for improving driver behavior and hence reducing road accidents in Bangladesh