The overturned bus at the roadside of the National Road 12 in Dien Bien Province. One passenger was killed in the accident.

Police will be pulling over bus drivers across the nation as part of a Ministry of Public Security inspection of bus safety prompted by soaring traffic accident death rates – 8,200 this year.

Major-general Do Dinh Nghi, head of the ministry’s Road and Railway Traffic Police Department, said all traffic police in all cities and provinces would be patrolling roads, staking out hot-spots and setting speed traps throughout the country, laying in wait with radar speedometers, cameras and breathalyzers.

Nghi said his department would ask the Ministry of Security to coordinate with the Ministry of Health to issue regulations on blood alcohol tests.

The Police General Department at the Ministry of Police said a primary focus of the campaign would be to identify the cause of serious accidents and bring those responsible for such accidents to trial.

The Ministry of Transport on Monday said long-distance buses traveling routes of more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) would have to install a “black box” from July next year.

The ministry’s Road Transport Department said it was conducting a survey to evaluate its+ capacity to supply the device on the market as it is mostly imported in Vietnam.

Nguyen Van Quyen, the agency’s deputy head, said the black box would have to satisfy several functions, including monitoring the vehicle’s speed, recording the route and time and keeping tabs on the opening and closing of the doors.

30 deaths a day

The Road and Railway Traffic Police Department reported that 8,525 road traffic accidents in the first nine months this year had killed 8,178 people and injured 5,499 others. Material losses in these cases were estimated to be around VND11.8 billion (US$661,400).

A quick calculation shows that an average of more than 30 were killed, and 20 others injured, every day so far this year.

These cases do not include 85 accidents that killed 95 people and injured 82 others over three days from October 3-5, the Road and Railway Traffic Police Department said.

Highway stories

Among those cases was an accident between two buses on October 4 on National Road 1A in the north-central province of Ha Tinh’s Ky Anh District that killed eight people and seriously injured 23 others.

The two vehicles traveling in opposite directions crashed into each other head-on around 2 a.m.

Police are investigating the cause of the accident but Nguyen Trong Danh, chief traffic police of Ky Anh District, speculated to VietNamNet that one of the buses could have lost it control when it hit a large pothole.

Colonel Vu Do Anh Dung, deputy head of the Road and Railway Traffic Police Department, said serious traffic accidents involving buses had increased to “alarming levels.”

Nearly half of bus accidents this year occurred on national highways and 80 percent of them were caused by buses operated by private enterprises, he added.

Private carelessness

Major-general Nghi said there was insufficient regulation of the bus industry.

In Vietnam, governmental agencies manage all bus stations but private enterprises or transport cooperatives can register their vehicles and drivers to operate at these stations.

“Many bus owners have hired a driver and collect a fix amount from him without paying any attention to what the driver does on the job,” he said. “These drivers are ready to violate any Traffic Law to pad their pockets with more passengers.”

Senior lieutenant-colonel Tran Son of the Road and Railway Traffic Police Department said many bus drivers didn’t even know proper traffic safety rules.

“Many enterprises are also lax in managing the drivers,” he added.

Nguyen Van Thanh, deputy head of Ministry of Transportation’s Vietnam Road Administration and former transport company owner, also said bus drivers were poorly managed and ill-disciplined.

Apart from a few famous companies, most of the others failed to follow regulations that require them to check up on the mental and physical health of their drivers, he said. The also neglected rules that forbade them to over-work their drivers.

Many drivers at small companies have admitted to carelessness behind the wheel. They say they do it out of competition with other drivers, the quickest of which gets the most passengers.

Source: Thanh Nien, Agencies