Abstract

Road traffic crash, tenth-leading cause of all deaths, kills around 1.24 million people globally. Although developed countries have shown significant progress in preventing this burden, fatality rate is considerably increasing in developing countries. In Bangladesh, around 21 000 people are killed annually in RTI whereas almost 43% of national highway crashes are concentrated on 5% of the total road length. It’s clearly perceptible that hazardous risky locations are clustered; hence intervention in small road length could save many lives. Considering this factor, Roads and Highways Department (RHD) of Bangladesh has recently implemented a project of 144 black spots improvement. 10 of these spots were in the district of Narsingdi, of Dhaka-Sylhet national highway (N2), one of the deadliest highways of Bangladesh which killed around 391 people and injured more than 1104 people within the year from 2008 to 2015. Majority of the victims of these crashes were pedestrians. Within the 45 kilometer project length, 40 fatal crashes occurred during the year 2006 to 2014. The major crash types were hit pedestrian, head-on and rear-end collision. Most of the time, human factor such as over speeding and over taking induces those crashes. After rigorous field visit and safety audit, proper engineering interventions were implemented within one year tine period that cost around 2 million USD. Majority of the works included curvature correction, delineation improvement, road widening, road divider and rumble strips construction. Out of the total expense, 71% cost were related to new pavement construction whereas road divider construction cost around 16% and delineation improvement cost around 11%. After the intervention, no fatal crashes have occurred yet which is a major success of the intervention. However, the intervention scheme could be improved through considering social intervention in the project area. Considering the short implementation period and cost effectiveness, this initiative could be replicated in many other LMICs.