Technical Control of Vehicles: a Means to Curb Accidents

Many drivers especially of transport vehicles dread Technical control of their vehicles.

Road accidents which have been very rampant lately in our towns and highways provoked the government to indulge in serious road safety campaigns to curb theses accidents. These accidents are not mostly caused by over speeding as it is often regarded or drunkenness. In most of such accidents, negligence has a great role to play. Some drivers do not take time to service their cars to ensure they are in a good state to ply the roads. Some accidents are caused by technical errors from some of the vehicles. A look at the kind of vehicles that ply the streets in the name of transport vehicles is disheartening. Most of them are very old car, with make terrible noises; some do not even have keys to start the car. They use two wires, the negative and positive to start the car.
Most drivers ignore taking their cars for technical controls. The cars are checked for errors and also to ensure they can freely ply the roads. Drivers claim their cars are good and do not need to be checked. They believe these kinds of controls are necessary for trucks which have constant break failures.
Talking to Mme Natanga Denise Aurelie, who is in charge of exploitation at the Satellite Ngono centre for technical control of vehicles and automobiles in Bonaberi, she said vehicles do stream in for technical control, while at other times they are not there. When these vehicles come for check up, the controller uses a remote control. The error if there is any is detected by the computer which gives the result of the check up.
Vehicles which have serious problems are given a verbal complain and given 15 days to do repairs if not the centre has to write a complain to the Delegation of Transport if the driver is recalcitrant. After check up, a windscreen licence is placed on the vehicle which states the date of visit and the next visit.
Asked if drivers dread these visit because of the cost of check up, she said the costs is a meagre sum. Taxis have a regular visit of thrice a year because of their over usage and each visit they have to pay FCFA 4,900, while personal cars, pick ups have a yearly visit and they pay FCFA 9,500, for buses and trucks they visit for check up twice a day and pay FCFA 11,925 and FCFA 14,410 respectively in each visit.
It is true that accidents are inevitable but if drivers become more careful in doing constant check up, it would go a long way to curb some unnecessary accidents which could have been avoided. The police too could be of help not to check only windscreen licences issued by the Ministry of Transport but to also check that which is given by the Centre for technical control so that it will cause many more cares to go for technical control.

EFFA TAMBENKONGHO