Four people have died in a horrible accident in which two buses collided head-on on the Galle Road at Pohaddaramulla near Kalutara the other day. One victim was a Grade 8 student of Ananda Vidyalaya while his mother was made a cripple with serious damage to her vertebral column. The agony caused to innocent families by the untimely demise of their loved ones is only known to themselves while hardly felt by outsiders and never by those responsible for these horrendous crimes.

It has been a long-felt need to bring about an effective solution to the menace of speeding of vehicles on our roads. Apart from the speed maniacs on motorbikes, bus drivers have become the worst offenders who play havoc with public safety, using their destructive machines as a lethal weapon not caring a hoot about other road-users - be it pedestrians or other vehicle owners. Their unbridled horseplay is often witnessed on highways connecting main cities like Galle, Matara and Kandy where it is a veritable race of buses to grab a fast buck by beating other contenders. I myself have encountered a number of such instances while driving along Galle Road when an express bus plying (or rather flying as it were) from Colombo suddenly took a sharp turn to the wrong side courting disaster which in only averted by the road-sense of other drivers.

No amount of road-side checks by the traffic police will be able to check this nefarious behaviour of our bus drivers because it is common sense that the rats will be at play when the cat is away. A most sensible thing to do would be to set up a mobile unit of ‘cops in civvies’ patrolling in unmarked vehicles so that the culprits can be nabbed without being noticed by them. The vehicles of this unit should be other than Jeeps or Land Rovers and should also be of nondescript make because the road hogs have sharp eyes to notice any particular kind employed by the law-enforcers. The efficacy of this kind of special unit would be that the offenders would have no way of finding a chance to put their foot down. Over to you Mr. IGP.