As reported in the newspaper, the ban is being put on iron rod bumpers; but these are made of other metals too, nickel for one, with a hollow, less brittle look; nevertheless, potentially hazardous to traffic. In the essence, we have to, therefore, standardise the bumpers that we may wish to add to vehicles, their design being approved and modelled along scientific lines so as to be traffic friendly. The communications minister's banning thought is welcome, but a move towards standardisation is awaited.

Roads have become virtual death-traps in so many other ways. This structural deficiencies apart, like for instance, the total road space being only eight per cent of the city area in stark contrast to the ideal 25 per cent, there are violations of traffic rules and norms, right, left and centre. Public service buses screech to halts at unscheduled stoppages making dangerous arcs as people with flailing limbs try to get on to the tiny foot-rest. With the vehicles picking up, some of the passengers look like cliff-hangers. There have been two telling indictments on such a violation of stop-over rules: once an accident caused a series of damages on a variety of transports lineally parked, as if in a bowling effect. On another occasion, a passenger getting off a still moving bus was sucked into its underside as it sped along. We have drop beats of heart all too often seeing people alighting from or getting on the buses the way they do on motion.

The pedestrians bring a lot of danger upon themselves as well as moving vehicles by crossing roads indiscriminately. Anyone driving through long stretches of thoroughfares, like for instance, Rampura-Badda-Baridhara artery joining the airport road, must have had his heart stop every time an individual or two dropped off the road side to cross. There are other scary common sights; clusters of people around extremely busy traffic intersections, impatient with the unbroken chain of vehicular traffic from all directions, often lunge forward, their feet wafer-thin away from the moving vehicles.

Pedestrians and rickshawpullers have an awkward tendency of gesticulating to the driver of an on-coming transport to stop oblivious of the speed it is on. They think that sticking out the hand to a moving vehicle is all they need to do to cross the roads. Taking risk of life on the road has become a dangerous trend, the suicidal tendency being perhaps the outcome of a resigned reaction to the anarchic variety of traffic mismanagement.

There has to be electronic road crossing signalling arrangement at more points than just one at the end of Panthapath where it falls on to the Mirpur Road.

Zebra crossings are few and far between. The road-breakers are either menacingly humpy or extremely sparse, meaning that they are more of a liability than an asset. To top these off, hardly is there any habitual use of underpasses or overpasses by the pedestrians. As if to emphasise their under-use, many of them have become the happy hunting ground for bad business of the deviant lot.

Ad-hoc measures will not do; a holistic approach is needed to be taken to the traffic mess. The narrowing down of whatever road network we have, by perpetual excavation activity, will have to stop. But above all, we are in dire need of modernising our traffic signalling system.