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Time to Tame the Traffic!
According to one of our SSPs of the Nepal Police, the roads of Kathmandu will be completely jammed with vehicular traffic within two years, and it would be better if folks took up speed walking to get around the valley. It would probably be much faster to get somewhere than drive your own vehicle around town.
If you drive around Kathmandu at early morning hours, the same distance that took you less than ten minutes will multiply by three or four when the peak traffic hours begin. We really don't have many roads, but we seem to have too many vehicles, especially our two-wheelers, running in tens of lakhs in the valley alone!
According to our data, there are more than twenty million vehicles in the country, and only 2,600 traffic cops waving their hands and breathing in the dust and making sure you don't ram each other on your way to work. And in Kathmandu Valley alone, two million vehicles roam around like crazy.
Let's do some math. There is one traffic cop per 700+ vehicles in the country. If this were a classroom, then our public school teacher would have long fled from his or her job and taken up drinking local raksi to get over the stress or leave everything and meditate in a cave somewhere.
According to our police wallahs, the traffic fines are peanuts and I agree with that. Nobody seems to be worried about paying your standard Rs 500 to 1,000 fine in this country. It's time to follow the US or the Singapore pricing system and jack it up to like US$ 200 or more and then maybe our folks will not speed or violate the lanes or start driving on pavements and one-way gallis!
Our police folks recommend increasing the fines from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000. I say make it ten times more. If you are caught speeding, then cough up Rs 50,000. If you are driving drunk, then a lakh, and if you are without your license and blue book and insurance, then make it a Rs 5 lakh fine. Then, we would probably be the most disciplined ones, following all traffic rules in our land!
I also think that helmets should be mandatory for all riders on two-wheelers, be it the guy speeding around or his girlfriend or friends or his parents riding on the back! Most of the serious injuries happen to the one without the helmet. And what are we going to do with our 'trippers' aka heavy duty dhoonga-bokney trucks, the number one killer on our roads bringing deaths to thousands of two-wheeler riders in this country?
I think there should be a serious punishment and the compensation should be not a measly 5 or 10 lakhs but at least Rs 1 crore if these truckers speed up and then crush other folks. It seems that they just spend a few years in jail and go back to speeding up and down the hill, carrying the dhoongas again!
Our traffic wallahs want the government to go for some kind of AI stuff when it comes to the traffic light system. Maybe it's time to do just that, but as usual, it is very hard to find the extra Rs 15 billion to fully go to an AI-traffic system across the country!
It's time we had all our traffic lights working properly everywhere and not let our poor traffic cops suffer from pollution and shaky hands and then suffer from COPD and other respiratory illnesses by the time they retire. I think the best option to prevent bus accidents across the country would be to strictly enforce the speed limit and any violations resulting in the confiscation of the vehicle.
Let's really act tough, or else we will keep on losing thousands of lives every year on our highways as speedy bus drivers drive themselves off the cliff along with tons of innocent passengers. And when it comes to the pollution, better to send all the polluting vehicles failing the pollution tests and old, creaky ones to the kawadi once and for all!
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