The inspection team was accompanied by local police
The inspection vehicle in Sylhet
In March 2010, with the support of the FIA Foundation, the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) undertook a safety assessment of the N2 Highway, Bangladesh’s major road link between the capital Dhaka and Sylhet in the north, led by Greg Smith iRAP’s Asia/Pacific Director and Shakireh Ispahani from the Make Roads Safe campaign.
The N2 is a new highway, with major rehabilitation and widening completed as recently as 2005 at a cost of US$330 million with financing from World Bank. The inspection of the N2 was undertaken as part of an iRAP project. A team of local engineers and experts from abroad travelled in a specially equipped vehicle capable of capturing high-resolution digital images of the road at 10 metre intervals while driving along the road at normal speeds. These images, which are linked to GPS and road geometry data, will be assessed by a team of ‘raters’ and used to generate road safety Star Ratings for vehicles, motorcycles, pedestrians and bicyclists.
The data will also enable recommendations to be made about where affordable yet highly effective improvements to the road can be made. Knowing what we do from iRAP’s previous projects and the experience of many other countries, the recommended improvements such as the installation of footpaths, safety barriers and better intersections will, without doubt, prevent many thousands of deaths and serious injuries.
Greg Smith commented: “The first thing you notice when driving along the N2 is the sheer volume of people using the road. School children, factory workers, farmers and people visiting markets all vie for limited road space with high-speed trucks, buses and cars. At one location, hundreds of people spill out of a textile factory onto the highway at the end of their shift. There are no footpaths, no pedestrian crossings and inadequate space for buses. It’s like watching high speed traffic barge through a pedestrian mall”.
“It’s difficult to imagine that this road design could ever have been considered adequate, by any reasonable assessment, for the mixed volume slow and fast vehicles and pedestrians. The design of the road encourages faster speeds, yet there is inadequate space for the combination of slow vehicles, faster vehicles and pedestrians. In reality, it’s a ‘one-size-fits-none’ road”.
According to the Accident Research Institute at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, some 27 employees of a single textile factory were killed in road crashes along one stretch of this road in a single 18 month period.
The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the world’s largest non-government organisation, has completed research showing that local people often mistake bus bays for places to set up markets; footpaths for repairing broken down vehicles; and roadways for drying rice.
Shakireh Ispahani, coordinator of the Make Roads Safe campaign in Bangladesh, comments: “Road designers seem to have given little thought to the fact that people using the road might not be aware of the intended use of various features. It’s really not surprising road designs commonly used in the developed world might not be immediately understood by local people in Bangladesh. Little thought seems to have been given to the subtleties of community life in rural Bangladesh”.
There are positive signs of change, however. On some busy urban roads innovative pedestrian bridges link all corners of intersections, with four arms meeting in the centre like a large floating X. Thousands of pedestrians are able to use these bridges to avoid the risk of mixing with the hectic traffic below. The Bangladesh Government has also been a keen supporter of establishing the Decade of Action on Road Safety and is now doing more to put in place strategies to save lives. The iRAP team held meetings with the Minister for Communications, Mr Syed Abul Hossain, who has encouraged his departmental officials to ensure that plans for new upgrades are safe. There is also a very strong will outside of government, in the form of a coalition for road safety including BRAC; Chevron; the Centre for Injury Prevention Research Bangladesh (CIPRB) and Accident Research Institute (ARI) at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Indeed, the FIA Foundation was encouraged to support the assessment of N2 following the ground-breaking work done by these organisations in creating the Bangladesh Road Safety Coalition. Internationally, the World Bank and leading development banks have jointly agreed to make road safety a priority in their road infrastructure portfolios, and to build their own internal road safety staff capacity. The objective, during the Decade of Action, is to make fatal design flaws on roads like the N2 a thing of the past.
Syed Zain Al-Mahmood, a journalist with the Bangladeshi newspaper Daily Star, accompanied the iRAP team on their inspection of the N2.
Click here to read his article ‘Highway to Hell’ >
To find out more about the work of iRAP please see www.irap.net