A month long drive by the Dhaka Metropolitan Police failed to enhance enforcement or compliance of traffic rules in the city.
The drive utterly failed to ensure seatbelt and motorbike helmet compliance, said critics.
Dhaka shows little sign of enhanced enforcement or compliance with traffic safety rules, they said.
And the city roads are no safer than they were before the drive, they said.
The DMP launched the drive on November 1 to curb fatal road accidents that claimed several lives in the capital in last two months.
Bangladesh Road Transport Authority—the official transport regulators—issued a notice asking owners to get all motorised vehicles equipped with seatbelts by October 31.
Mobile courts checked and fined drivers across the country from November 1 for failing to wear seatbelts.
The BRTA enforcement department launched a massive awareness campaign before the special drive began on October 27.
However, the much-vaunted initiative proved useless as the owners failed to install seatbelts in public transports, particularly buses, microbuses, trucks and three wheelers.
DMP commissioner Benajir Ahmed told New Age that hundreds of cases had been filed against the vehicle owners and drivers for driving on the city roads without wearing seatbelts.
He said it would take time before better compliance could be ensured.
But BRTA director for enforcement Tapan Kanti Sarkar told New Age that the police failed to enforce the rules despite a clear directive from the regulators.
Similar drives in the past also failed to enhance compliance with traffic safety rules.
A recent move to enforce the lane system on the city’s major roads proved totally abortive.
A police drive, earlier in the year, to remove from the congested city roads worn out buses, trucks and other vehicles also failed due to police-transport owners’ nexus.
Critics say that the owners greased the authorities to make it an ineffective drive.
No wonder the vehicles worn out by age are back, after a break of a couple of days, to make the roads as congested as ever, they said.
According to BRTA, about 13,780 vehicles, have registrations to run on city roads, though they lost road worthiness long back.
The owners pressed the vehicles into service at least 20 years back or even earlier, as the regulators’ statistics show.
Among the worn out vehicles are: 1,446 buses and 2,365 mini-buses and about 8,125 trucks and 1,842 vans that ran for more than 25 years.
In September 2010, the police launched a futile drive to discourage car owners from installing additional bumpers a cause of fatal road accidents.
