The tale of un-engineered humps and safety on roads

The high rate of indiscipline on the country’s road transport sector has resulted in high incidentce of avoidable fatalities, robbing it of billions of cedis annually, excluding productive human capital and properties.

According to the National Road Safety Commission, Ghana loses more than 1.6 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through road accidents in terms of properties, human capital, health-related problems and productivity.

The liberalisation of the country’s transport sector has led to the uncontrolled flooding of the space, where players have relegated the safety of the citizenry to the background in satisfying their selfish interests for profits.

Consequently, many vehicles that are not even supposed to be on the roads are being used for commercial purposes with impunity.

One factor that serves as a motivation for commercial drivers and which propels them beyond the safety of the travelling public and pedestrians is profit. Drivers, particularly commercial ones, have no respect for road traffic regulations. They don’t adhere to speed limits in towns and villages.

It is obvious that when the system fails to project its people, the people will invariably take the law into their own hands, a situation that culminates in danger, with repercussions borne by innocent citizens.
 
One of such acts is the troubling phenomena of the construction “of
unauthorised speed humps” on the country’s roads, particularly in the Western and Central regions.

Speed humps

It is said that the use of speed humps in heavily populated areas or along highways have been proven to significantly reduce road accidents in those areas.

This is because the proponents of this theory assumed, wrongly though, that humps effectively reduced travelling speeds, thus reducing the number of collisions in these identified populated areas such as shopping centres, parking areas around schools and villages along highways.

The method of operation of communities along major roads is to heap sand and clay on the roads and within days, a group of people who consider themselves contractors and engineers are on sight, cutting through the hitherto smooth roads with their implements in the name of constructing humps.

However as the elders say, “When one empathises with the hawk, one must as well empathise with the chick.”

The apparent wanton disregard for road signs and signals on the part of drivers, who ply our roads cannot be overemphasised.

They lack discipline and assume an induced air of importance when they sit behind the steering wheels unmindful of the fact that what they are driving are machines and those who sit behind these wheels are human beings.

This recklessness, disrespect and disdain for road regulations have made the drivers not to slow down in communities where the highway authorities have erected signposts displaying speed limits of 50km/h.

As a result, the 359km stretch of road from Elubo in the Jomoro District of the Western Region through Sekondi/Takoradi, Aburansa, Ayensudo, Cape Coast, Saltpond, Biriwa, Anomabu, Abandze and Winneba in the Central Region, to Accra and the Kumasi-Bibiani road as well as roads in the northern parts of the Western and Central regions, have many of such unauthorised speed humps.

Very soon, our communities and towns would be inundated with these ugly road structures. The construction of humps has now become a competition as every community tries to outdo the other in who can construct the best fit to their own specifications.

In consequence of their action, a journey that would have used a specified length of time to cover now uses double  the same time.

 Aburansa and Ayensudu

To some of these communities, the undisciplined drivers have sacrificed too many of their indigenes to the roads due to their carelessness. These drivers speed through the communities without respect for the lives of the people.

At Ayensudo and Aburansa in the Central Region, the residents were of the view that since the authorities had failed to hold drivers accountable, they were not ready to allow the lawlessness to continue through the town.

A resident, who only wanted to be known as Opanyin Kweku, said: “I have lost a child  to the speeding vehicles. In the month of July 2017, a speeding vehicle killed twins walking on the side of the road who were waiting to cross the road. For whatever reason, they were caught up in the reckless driving and we lost them,” he added.

He said the community did not take pride in creating those heaps of sand as humps, “but we were left with no option than what we did. Cement and other haulage trucks speed through the community as if they are on the highway”.

 The chicken and egg

Like the proverbial chicken and egg situation, one would want to know which came first, road or community? Did the community relocate onto the road or the road was deliberately diverted through the community?
The residents of some communities were of the view that  they existed in the area before the  highway was constructed. The community, they contend, was there but during the reconstruction, the roads were diverted through the communities.

Many of the residents say their resolve to heap sand on roads as speed humps was as a result of the refusal of the highway authority and district assemblies to come to their aid.

The situation, according to the Western Regional Director of the Ghana Road Safety Commission (GRSC), Mr Bismarck Boakye, is the indiscipline of the system.


“Several lives and properties were lost through the construction of these humps on the highways due to the non-adherence to speed limits,” he said.
Drivers, he said, are supposed to reduce speed to 50km/h in communities or less depending on the prevailing situation.

When these are respected, the tendency of driving through the communities at top speed and killing members of the communities, mostly children, will become a thing of the past.

 “But unfortunately, in most cases, some opinion leaders in the communities, including some members of Parliament (MPs), meet and agree to the heaping of sand in the middle of the highway to slow down the movement of vehicles.

The danger

The difference is that the conventionally engineered humps come with specifications - the breadth and other road signs - to warn approaching vehicles of the obstacle ahead.

“However, the hard truth is that these heaps of sand do not come with road signs and mostly do not conform with any road regulation. Recently, we had to arrest a chief of a town on the way to Cape Coast because after an accident that claimed lives, they heaped sand on the road, contrary to our regulations,” Mr Boakye said.

The view is that until the puzzle of recklessness on the part of most drivers and the protection of the lives of children in the various communities are resolved (through road signs), communities will continue to mount mounds.