Road Safety Authority And Others To Digitise The Transport Sector
The Public Relations Officer of the National Road Safety Authority, Madam Pearl has hinted of the digitalisation of the country’s Transport Sector in the nearest future. She stated this when she briefed this paper with modalities in connection with that programme at The International Drivers and Vehicles Innovation Conference in Accra . She intimated that it has become so imperative to modernize the transport sector to ; Reduce Road Crashes and Fatalities ,and Check and Monitor Drivers Behaviour on the road. She postulated these these two problems have accounted for majority of road crashes in the country.She indicated that the Authorities is doing this in tandem with the DVLA and the Ghana Police Service to help reduce crashes by at least 15 % and to a higher percentage as time goes on.
The three agencies believe that there’s there’s the need to save lives and properties on our roads. To achieve this the DVLA will fix some new devices on all commercial vehicles to track any reckless driving, driving misconduct and accidents that can be immediately addressed without time-wasting.
“We are going to register all commercial drivers and their vehicles throughout the country and fix devices to monitor and track them down easily . Every commercial driver must belong to one union or the other so that the union will feed the DVLA and the Police with the names of their drivers and registration numbers of all their commercial vehicles ; No ‘Waa Waa’ or wayside drivers because we want to monitor them vigorously on our central monitoring systems to ensure sanity on our roads “. In order to make the work easy due to the size of the country ,the agencies will divide the country into driving zones for easy trailing and monitoring. So as soon as the device sends signal or alarm to the zonal office,quick action will be dispensed by a task force who will dash there in topmost speed to tackle the issue to save lives and properties . She mentioned that with this device and portal,no driver or vehicle can escape any wrong doing and all commercial vehicles in operation will be known and monitored accordingly throughout the country. Madam further stated that all government occupancy buses as well as institutions’s buses will also be affected. With respect to calibre of drivers to be on our roads, she emphasised that every commercial driver must have at least three years driving experience and valid drivers license before one can be allowed to drive on the highways.
She disclosed that there are plans to retrain old drivers to be abreast with new vehicles emerging on the market. Again there’s going to be drivers training school set up soon to be manned by the NRSA and the DVLA to train the commercial drivers in the country. She warned that any driver who removes or tampers with the digital devices will disable his own car to shut down . Without the device no vehicle can move or licenced. This is because it is the device that can car move and any incident will have to be recorded on the monitoring screen at the various agencies or zonal offices . Worst still, that driver risks of not acquiring any vehicular documents to operate not forgetting the penalty associated with this misconduct.
“What we are trying to do is before any car sets off, we will check whether the devices are firmly fixed ; that the driver is hale and sound and the vehicle is in stable, better condition before it sets off. You will agree with me that as a result of lack of supervision and vigilance some drivers have taken lives of people for granted but we are up and going to be on top of our jobs.
The conference brought all transport operators in Africa and other countries to discuss the new way of positioning the transport industry in Africa.
