Road Safety Problems in Bangladesh: Achievable Target and Tangible Sustainable Actions

In spite of great progress in international traffic safety works, traffic accidents still cause a large and increasing number of fatalities and severe injuries particularly in developing countries like Bangladesh. Sustained declining trends of road fatalities in the developed countries have been attributed to concerted efforts in many sectors including effective coordination, community involvement, well researched road safety initiatives, road safety good practices and improved targeting of resources. The statistics revealed that Bangladesh has one of the highest fatality rates in road accidents with over 50 fatalities per 10,000 on-road motor vehicles. In this paper, it is trying to show in detail the magnitude and impact of road traffic injuries using evidence at global and national levels with particular importance of regional variance. This evidence shows how serious the problem of road traffic injuries is at present and indicates that it will become worse if no appropriate action is taken now. This paper also briefly discusses the factors that play a part in accident generation process in interaction with road environment, road-user and vehicle and outlines some target oriented priority actions to prevent this recurrent loses.