Safety Audits Cover Just 5 Percent of 22,000 km of Roads, With No One Checking Whether the Fixes Are Made
A road safety audit is meant to pinpoint exactly where the risk of a crash lurks on a road. When risks are found, recommendations are made to remove them. But whether those recommendations are ever implemented, or whether the danger actually falls as a result, nobody regularly checks. So while there is a system for identifying road hazards, its effectiveness remains wide open to question.
The Roads and Highways Department (RHD) is responsible for roughly 22,000 kilometres of roads. Its road safety branch has audited only about 1,100 kilometres of them — just 5 percent of the total. For the remaining 95 percent, no audit information at that scale is available through the branch.
Large projects, however, conduct their own separate safety audits. The 209 kilometres of the Dhaka-Sylhet highway have been audited, and the highway project from Elenga in Tangail to Rangpur in the north has also carried out an internal safety audit.
A road safety audit is a systematic examination of safety risks at three stages of a road or road project: design, construction and use. Its purpose is to detect potential dangers in advance and prevent crashes. Auditors inspect curves, junctions, dividers, signs and signals, visibility and pedestrian crossings, and then flag the risks they find.
Under the rules, once a consultancy firm submits its report with recommendations, the relevant road division or project authority is supposed to implement them. But according to sources familiar with the process, there is no regular accounting of how many recommendations have been implemented, how much risk has been reduced, or how many remain outstanding. The mindset of avoiding extra cost, and the absence of any legal obligation to conduct audits, are why the matter keeps being sidestepped.
An official of the RHD road safety branch said audits take place at three stages — during design, during construction and after the road opens. The reports are sent to the relevant road divisions and project authorities, who then take steps to implement the recommendations according to priority.
A striking example of risks surviving an audit is the Dhaka-Mawa-Bhanga Expressway. The modern highway was reviewed under a road safety audit in the 2020-21 fiscal year, with numerous safety aspects examined. Yet several major crashes have occurred there since, raising the question of what was actually done to remove the risks the audit identified and how effective its recommendations proved. RHD officials, for their part, maintain that crashes on this high-speed highway are caused by excessive speed and a lack of surveillance.
RHD Chief Engineer Md Moniruzzaman said: 'Initiatives are being taken to conduct road safety audits on all roads. It is a continuous process. Safety is being given priority especially on development-project roads, and audits will also be done on roads outside projects. Earlier the main goal was improving connectivity; now reducing accidents and ensuring safe movement are also receiving importance. When an audit identifies an accident-prone spot, necessary measures are taken through the design unit, and at the implementation stage the executive engineer of the district concerned supervises it.'
Road safety experts say an audit's effectiveness cannot be judged merely by how many kilometres were inspected. It is equally necessary to verify whether the identified defects were corrected, whether the recommendations were implemented and by how much the risk fell. Like roads under construction, roads already in use also need regular audits, they argue.
Despite government and private initiatives and campaigns, road crashes and deaths in the country show no steady downward trend. According to the Passenger Welfare Association, 72,736 accidents over the past 13 years have killed 125,405 people and injured 176,249.
Figures from the Road Safety Foundation show that motorcycle accidents in the country numbered 1,381 in 2020 and rose to 3,029 by 2025 — an increase of about 119 percent in six years for the fast two-wheelers. Over the same period, deaths in motorcycle accidents climbed from 1,463 to 2,671, roughly 83 percent higher. Those involved in the sector say that beyond flaws in road design and infrastructure, the causes of crashes include excessive speed, driver behaviour, the technical condition of vehicles and disregard for traffic laws.
Professor Shamsul Haque of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) said road safety audits must not remain a mere formality. It is essential to ensure that audit recommendations are implemented in the field. A safety assessment must be guaranteed before a road is built, and audits must be repeated every two to three years after construction, because a road's risks change over time. Risks must be identified and preventive measures taken before accidents happen, with year-round data collection and analysis. That, he said, requires political will from the government and accountability from the institutions concerned.
Armana Sabiha Haque Liva, an assistant professor at BUET's Accident Research Institute, said Bangladesh's road safety problem is a failure of the entire system. Here, action is taken after accidents, whereas risk needs to be reduced before they occur. The culture of shifting blame must give way to accountability. Road safety success, she said, should be measured not by how many projects were taken up, but by how many people made it home safely.
State Minister for Road Transport and Highways Habibur Rashid said the government has taken initiatives under short- and long-term plans to reduce road accidents. The target is to cut road deaths by 50 percent by 2030, and an integrated road safety law is to be enacted by December 2027. Once the law takes effect, coordination among ministries and effective action will become easier, he said.
